The World According to Garp 597Milton feels no guilt for his dalliance with a married
woman: It is a conquest and a desire that he refuses
to relinquish. His lack of guilt is punished in the
most disabling, permanent way. His transgression is
not participation in adultery but the insistence that,
when made public, he refuses to let it go. He feels
no guilt; he is not grown up (and now, lacking full
sexual identity, he never will be). For Irving, guilt is
a maker of maturity, a sign of adulthood. Helen and
Garp cannot fully accept their adulthoods, cannot be
a mature couple, until they feel and resolve the guilt
caused by their indiscretions.
The price of their straying is terrible. Walt is
killed instantly. Helen and Garp survive the crash
physically intact, injured but alive. Duncan loses
an eye. It takes the tragic death of one son and the
blinding of another for them to tackle the depth
of their guilt, the denials and evasions that sprout
from it, when they can finally resolve the failures of
their relationship and learn to grow up together. In
the relentless pessimism of Irving’s novel, of course,
this would not be the last terror or tragedy, but it is
the central event of the book, and the impetus for
denouement of the novel. The resolution of guilt—
physical, emotional, sexual, and personal—is the
movement of the last third of The World According
to Garp.
Aaron Drucker
parenthood in The World According to Garp
Garp spends most of his adult life tending to his
children’s needs and keeping the house in order (not
too neat, though) while awaiting his next surge of
inspiration. While Helen teaches at a local women’s
college, Garp writes his first novel “between diaper
changes and feedings” and his second in much the
same way, though with less success. Garp considers
himself a good father (privately, perhaps, better than
“good”), and he frequently judges other parents by
his own unusually devoted standards. But, in The
World According to Garp, you can’t be too careful.
In the beginning of the novel, there is Jenny
Fields, Garp’s mother. Meticulous, methodical, and
distant, she does not want the burdens of a “normal”
relationship, so she impregnates herself by way of
an extraordinary affair with the mortally wounded
technical sergeant Garp. Fatherless, Garp grows
up at the Steering School comparing his caring
and cautious but practical and efficient mother to
the families of other students, most notably the
campus-ensconced Percys. Jenny Fields teaches
Garp to disdain relationships like those exemplified
by the Percy clan: wealthy, privileged, unfocused,
and (thus) valueless. Though the Percy household
displays all the trappings of child-rearing, “carpeted
and spacious and full of generations of tasteful toys,”
the parents of the Percy children do not have “the
brains to worry about their children as much as
they should.” Carelessness, the mortal sin of Garp’s
conception of parenthood, is a prevalent part of the
Percys’ parenting strategy, and while under the inat-
tentive eyes of the Percy parents, it quite literally
ends up biting Garp when Bonkers, the Percys’ dog,
chews off the better part of his left ear. The Percy
children are raised with a casual carelessness that
allows, in better minds, the flowering of success,
the type expected of wealthy legacy children. On
the other hand, this same casual regard for caution
allows a freedom in the children that leads to pain,
tragedy, and finally to madness. Parenthood, for
Jenny Fields, is about being careful. Only when the
watchful eye of the parent is missing do children get
into trouble. The lesson is not lost on Garp.
Garp and Helen have three children: Duncan,
Walt, and later, Jenny. For the narrator, the subjec-
tive perspective of Garp’s fatherhood is continually
explored in the first half of the novel through the
protagonist’s unceasing cacophony of opinion on
other parents’ apparent failures. “Mrs. Ralph,” the
mother of Duncan’s friend Ralph, is the epitome
of Garp’s failed parent. As painted by Garp, Mrs.
Ralph is a nasty portrait of single motherhood.
Garp’s encounters leave him with the impression she
is slovenly, drunk, promiscuous, and unmotivated.
In an extended episode, Garp concludes that Mrs.
Ralph is unfit as a parent, and he will watch his son’s
sleep-over at Ralph’s. While the results are comic,
her inaction is innocuous. For all of Mrs. Ralph’s
faults, even in her unmindful way, Ralph and Dun-
can remain safe, if not indulging in the quality of
cuisine Garp would serve.
However much Garp’s theory of parenthood
rests on his being careful, The World According to
Garp inexorably drifts into irony. Protecting his