SOURCE: "Double Discourses in John Irving's The World According to Garp," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 38, No. 4, Winter, 1992, pp. 457-75.

In the following essay, McKay examines the dual narrative voice of Garp as both biographer and fiction writer. According to McKay, "the narrator's struggle with the languages of fiction and biography is the mirror image of Garp's struggle as a writer with the forces of memory and imagination."

In The World According to Garp John Irving forms a type of dialogue within the narration by creating a narrator who uses a double discourse: that of the biographer and that of the fiction writer. It is not unusual in the Bildungsroman genre, to which this novel most certainly belongs, for the narrator to adopt the role of biographer to a certain extent. Bildungsroman narrators do not generally, however, adopt that stance as explicitly as Irving's narrator does. As Michael...