SOURCE: Lounsberry, Barbara. “The Terrible Under Toad: Violence as Excessive Imagination in The World according to Garp.” Thalia 5, no. 2 (fall 1982-winter 1983): 30-5.

In the following essay, Lounsberry posits that The World according to Garp functions primarily as a social satire in which excess and extremism—particularly in the realms of sex, sexual politics, parenting, and the imagination—eventually lead to violence and destruction.

Violence, both physical and psychological, is one of the most unnerving features of The World According to Garp, John Irving's 1978 novel of mutilation and death in American society. The novel, which follows three generations of Garps from World War II into the twenty-first century, contains, to be precise, three rapes, two assassinations, two accidental deaths, the loss of an eye, the loss of two ears, the loss of an arm, the loss of a penis, and a whole society of women with amputate tongues. Irving's...