Parents and Children
What it means to be a parent and challenging conventional notions and traditions is a major theme of the novel which should not be surprising considering the unusual means by which its titular hero was conceived. The decidedly non-conformist manner in which Garp’s mother Jenny impregnates herself sets the stage for an examination of the role parenthood and how parenting decisions impact the development of children that trickles down to her son’s being at the vanguard of the stay-at-home dad busting of conventions.
The Absurd World of Garp
One of the most ironic casting decisions in the history of film adaptations occurred when the manic comic and living amphetamine Robin Williams was chosen to play the solidly grounded observer of eccentrics surrounding, T.S. Garp. Garp is the eyes through the reader can observe the absurd situations and idiosyncratic personalities that drive the story around him. Take individually, there are any number of events which occur in the world of Garp that would draw attention to themselves as being unrealistically engineered for the sake of fiction. That so many of these bizarre, macabre, horrifying or simply unusual things do seem to inhabit the limited world in which Garp lives suggests that if we take the time to really think about it, we can all probably point to a number of incredibly unlikely incidents that took place around us.
Gender Roles
John Irving was examining gender conventions, expectations, stereotypes and societal in The World According to Garp long before it was cool. The most obvious realization of this thematic concern is the transsexual Roberta Muldoon who crosses freely over the lines separating gender and effectively blurs them beyond all distinction, but equally delineated is Garp’s mother, Jenny. Jenny is a unique and original feminist whose iconoclastic views toward gender conformation and sexist appropriation of autonomy of the body is effective the force that drives the entire narrative. Without Jenny’s original blasting away of expectations of gender-based morality, that world would not have Garp to observe all its many absurd realities.
