The World According to Garp | Literary Precedents
Because The World According to Garp is not part of a subgenre of fiction such as the mystery or the detective novel, it has no precise literary precedents. Irving does, however, follow many of the patterns of the traditional novel, making use of coincidence and creating subplots-such as those involving Roberta Muldoon and Ellen James—that become tangled with the major plot line. His characterization, too, is reminiscent of novels by Dickens and Hawthorne, among others. Although Irving's fiction is grounded in the realistic tradition of the past hundred years, his characters are...
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