The World According to Garp | Emotional Responses in The World According to Garp
In this essay, the author examines the possible reasons why the characters and storyline in Irving's novel, although fraught with tragedy, elicit very little sorrowful or distressing emotional responses.
John Irving's The World According to Garp is often referred to as a tragicomedy, a term that identifies a story as containing representations of both the lighter situations of life that cause laughter and the more sorrowful consequences of human actions that cause tears. Irving's novel definitely has large quantities of both types of these situations, spurred by unending strings of episodes that readers might conclude only Irving could successfully place into one novel. However, although the comic reactions to Irving's story are easily stirred, there is a hesitation or outright...
[The entire page is 2275 words long]
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