"The World According to Garp"

Paper Summary:

The writer discusses how, in "The World According to Garp", John Irving has created a masterpiece that combines feminism, the writer's world, adultery, sex, death, and optimism. Irving also demonstrates how life goes on despite the mayhem that stalks our lives every day. It discusses how Garp portrays the message that something good always comes out of bad happenings, and there is a dangerous 'undertoad' waiting just around the corner for each and every one of us. How we meet and deal with it is our responsibility. It shows how John Irving's story is about how one man does just that.

From the Paper:

"In the world most people live in, violence rarely leaves a sense of optimism in its wake. But in The World According to Garp, by John Irving, the overwhelming feeling that suffuses readers after each violent episode is that life goes on. In this amazing story, "people are dying almost from the first page, but by the end, the reader is neither bored with death, nor hardened to it" (Marcus 295). Irving uses death, quite a lot of it, in his masterpiece. However, despite the increasing savagery of the events in the book, readers accept it "because one has come to accept Irving's characters as people, as friends" (295). Irving blurs the line we tend to draw between ordinary and violent death by presenting us with a world in which "the normal and the perverse coexist without ever considering that they shouldn't or couldn't" (296). A causal glance through The World According to Garp would give readers a grim, pessimistic opinion of Garp's world; but with the help of an omniscient narrator, the undercurrent of optimism can be found, even in the most horrific death scenes."

More papers on "The World According to Garp":

• Analytical Essay # 43218 : "Themes in "The World According to Garp"
• Analytical Essay # 51875 : "Characters in "The World According to Garp"
• Essay # 2942 : "The Under Toad"

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