SOURCE: "The Postmodern Novel: The Example of John Irving's The World According to Garp," in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1, Fall. 1992. pp. 49-62.

In the following essay, Wilson examines the postmodern construction of The World According to Garp, particularly elements of metafiction, irony, and the gothic bizarre in the novel.

As a novel that recapitulates within itself a history of twentieth-century fiction, John Irving's The World According to Garp illustrates a key aspect of postmodernism, that of formal replenishment. The earlier segments of Garp exhibit strong elements of modernism whereas in its final third, Irving's book is a postmodern novel of bizarre violence and black humor, flat characters, and metafiction—a mode of writing one might expect from the pen of John Barth, Robert Coover, or Thomas Pynchon. Specifically, in its First segment, Garp is the artist's bildungsroman like James Joyce's A Portrait of the...