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

In the following essay, Wilson claims John Irving 's The World According to Garp as an example of postmodern literature precisely because it borrows stylistically from such diverse writers as James Joyce, John Cheever, and John Barth.

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...