SOURCE: "The Politics of Selfhood: Bob Slocum, T. S. Garp and Auto-American-Biography," in Novel, Vol. 20, No. 1, Fall, 1986, pp. 41-61.

In the following excerpt, Carton examines "the issue of the individual's uncertain identity and political complicity" in The World According to Garp.

As an idea and a commodity, the personalized life in America numbers among our most popular notions. This curious cultural circumstance reflects the disparity that various critics have observed between our governing model of selfhood and its consequences: that of a privileged, personally empowered and singularly expressive identity whose realization, in Fredric Jameson's words, ironically "maims our existence as individual subjects and paralyzes our thinking about time and change just as surely as it alienates us from our speech itself." Such an irony is hardly new in American literature. Indeed, Sacvan Bercovitch takes it to originate our literary history—a theory that helps explain the strange typological...