SOURCE: Horton, Andrew. “Comic Triumph in George Roy Hill's Adaptation of John Irving's The World according to Garp.” Studies in American Humor 4, no. 3 (fall 1985): 173-82.

In the following essay, Horton compares the novel The World according to Garp to the film adaptation directed by George Roy Hill, suggesting that the film effectively preserves the spirit of the novel while adding a comic sense of the triumph of the human spirit which remains absent from Irving's novel.

Above all else, John Irving's 1978 best-selling novel The World According to Garp fits a post-modernist view of the triumph of narrative over life.¹ In hundreds of sprawling pages, Irving traces the life, creative life, and death of his protagonist, T. S. Garp, who attempts to hold together a comic-tragic “world” of his own against the “coursing waters” of American life around him. Garp dies, but the narrative remains as a tribute and...