Because the term zone comes from Gravity's Rainbow, this category highlights the relationship between Garp and Thomas Pynchon's great novel. Speaking of the zone of occupation in defeated Germany, Brian McHale says that as Gravity's Rainbow unfolds, "hallucinations and fantasies become real, metaphors become literal, the fictional worlds of the mass media—the movies, comicbooks—thrust themselves into the midst of historical reality." As such, "Pynchon's zone is paradigmatic for the heterotopain space of postmodernist writing" (45). The World According to Garp has a zone, as I shall argue, that fits Gravity's Rainbow's paradigm. Brian McHale suggests that behind all the postmodernist fictional construction of zones "lies Apollinaire's poem, 'Zone' (from Alcools, 1913), whose speaker, strolling through the immigrant and red-light districts of Paris, finds in them an objective correlative for modern Europe and his own marginal, heterogeneous, and outlaw experience" (44). However, an even better explanation might be found in Philip Roth's observation that "the toughest problem for the American writer was that the substance of the American experience itself was so abnormally and fantastically strange, it had become an 'embarrassment to one's own meager imagination'" (Bellamy 3). "If reality becomes surrealistic," Joe David Bellamy asks, "what must fiction do to be realistic?" (5). It must become bizarre, goes one answer.

The bizarre connects realistic fiction to fantasy and myth. Fantasy is an old form that takes on new implications when used consciously by the contemporary writer, not as an alternative or escape from reality but as the best method available for catching the emotional essence of our era. The distinction between fantasy and myth is not always easy to maintain when one looks at individual stories, although theoretically a mythically structured story may maintain a surface sense of realism the way a fantasy story cannot.

Also connected to the bizarre characteristic of these zones is the postmodern novel's black humor. In The Fabulators, Robert Scholes says that black humorists, in a century of historical horror, deal with the absurdity of "the human situation" by seeing it "as a cosmic joke" (45). He suggests that in contrast to the existentialist, the black humorist offers an alternative: "The best response is neither acquiescence nor bitterness"; rather one must play "one's role in the joke in such a way as to turn the humor back on the joker or cause it to diffuse itself harmlessly on the whole group which has participated in the process of the joke" (44).

As the extreme epitome of the atmosphere of much postmodern fiction, the zone of the bizarre compensates for its retreat from the strict tenets of realism by evoking echoes of no-less-real feelings from our personas pasts, feelings that today we can experience only in dreams or in moments of great stress—of terror, perhaps—when our "normal" functioning breaks down. Although we repress these feelings, we react with a mixture of anxiety and secret welcoming when the television news reports events that cannot be grasped without reference to such emotions. Through the bizarre, postmodern fiction taps and reflects this source of emotional power and does so, not despite, but because of its departure from the formal tenets of "realism," which center on an attempt to penetrate into the depths of character.