Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Irving, John (Vol. 112) - Kim McKay (essay date Winter 1992)

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Kim McKay (essay date Winter 1992)

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...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Jack Beatty (review date 23 September 1981)
   2. Caryn Fuoroli (review date January 1982)
   3. Evan Carton (essay date Fall 1986)
   4. Janice Doane and Devon Hodges (essay date 1986)
   5. Wendy Steiner (review date 19 May 1989)
   6. Robert Towers (review date 20 July 1989)
   7. Edward C. Reilly (essay date 1991)
   8. Kim McKay (essay date Winter 1992)
   9. Raymond J. Wilson III (essay date Fall 1992)
   10. Irving Weinman (review date 9 April 1993)
   11. Robert Towers (review date 4 September 1994)
   12. Sven Birkerts (review date 4 February 1996)
   13. Andrew Rosenheim (review date 4 February 1996)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright