SOURCE: McKay, Kim. “Double Discourses in John Irving's The World according to Garp.” Twentieth Century Literature 38, no. 4 (winter 1992): 457-75.

In the following essay, McKay examines the dual narrative voice of T. S. Garp as both biographer and fiction writer in The World according to Garp.

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 Priestly notes, the narrator “is intended to be Garp's official biographer” (87). Using evidence from secondary sources, paying particular attention to the incidents in...