SOURCE: Shostak, Debra. “Plot as Repetition: John Irving's Narrative Experiments.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 37, no. 1 (fall 1995): 51-70.

Sorrow floats. So claims the narrator of John Irving's novel, The Hotel New Hampshire (1981). Sorrow is the flatulent Labrador retriever who dies but does not disappear, the free-floating dog of anxiety whose remains come to the surface even after the airplane he rides in plunges into the sea. Sorrow is the return of the repressed, punning reminder and even cause of the violence that is our human lot (one of his postmortem appearances sends a family member into cardiac arrest), and his visitations provide a symbolic structure for John Berry's narration of the Berry family's lives.

Sorrow's repetitions in the narrative of The Hotel New Hampshire typify not only Irving's tragicomic vision, but his technique as well. Irving has discussed the “refrains” or “little litanic devices” (Miller 193) that pepper his fiction—tag lines and key phrases such as “in the world according to Garp we are all …” (The World According to Garp), “keep passing the open windows” (Hotel), or “wait and see” (The Cider House Rules).¹ Irving's verbal repetitions are frequently supplemented by obsessive motifs—metaphors and characters calling attention to themselves as motifs—that may create patterns within a single novel and/or appear across several: notable examples include bears (Setting Free the Bears, Garp, and Hotel), wrestling (The 158-Pound Marriage, Garp, and Hotel), Vienna (Bears, The Water-Method Man, Marriage, and Garp), womb symbols (Marriage, Garp, and Cider House), and amputations and other forms of maiming, often with phallic resonances (Garp, Cider House, and A Prayer for Owen Meany). It would be easy enough to pass over these as obvious formal devices, Irving's fictional tics that at times trivialize themselves by being coyly habitual; they are his too-warm “security blankets” (Interview with Renwick 7). But in these motifs—and, in particular, in their status, by definition, as repeated items—lies a clue to some of the larger questions that Irving's novels pose about fictional form. In various ways, most of the novels explore the nature of plotting: how we read plot, how characters determine and are determined by plot, how plotting implies certain epistemological and ethical positions, and how these questions might illuminate our extrafictional structurings of experience.

It seems to me that there are two possible responses to narrative repetitions. The first, and more immediate, readerly response is to experience the uncanny; that is, one is unsettled because repetition suggests that events fall into some pattern rather than being chaotic and contingent. The second, more “knowing,” response is to displace the experience so as to see repetitions as contrived, coincidental, corny. The very repression of the uncanny, however, attests to the power of the repressed. To admit the possibility of meaningful, even necessary, repetition is to open up to larger systems of design—to the possibility of psychological, spiritual, or aesthetic determinism. And these possibilities are precisely what Irving probes; as he told an interviewer, “I don't believe in accidents” (Hansen 99). The often apparent plotting of Irving's novels—most tellingly represented in The World According to Garp (1978) and A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)—argues for a link between psychological and aesthetic determinism. By exposing the ways that narrative takes shape, especially as narratives refer either to their beginnings or their endings, Irving reveals the symbiosis between psychological necessity and what has been termed narrative desire.

Irving's comments about how he plots his novels are telling:

I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters. … I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue. I love plot, and how can you plot a novel if you don't know the ending first? How do you know how to introduce a character if you don't know how he ends up? You might say I back into a novel. All the important discoveries—at the end of a book—those are the things I have to know before I know where to begin.

(Hansen 79-80)

His teleological sense of plot, and particularly the way a beginning can develop toward the already-known ending, can be elucidated with the help of Peter Brook's Freudian theorizing about narrative desire, detailed in Reading for the Plot. Brooks figures the narrative text as a psychic entity, a mind (90), and subjects the text's desire—the mechanics of choice in plotting—to psychoanalytic scrutiny. Among Brooks's central concerns are conventions of beginnings and endings. Because narrative desire is ultimately desire for the end, reading practices have often looked to closure for narrative meaning. In investigating the inevitable relationship between the sense of a beginning and the sense of an ending (94), Brooks finds in the primacy given to endings an “apparent paradox,”

since narrative would seem to claim overt authority for its origin, for a “primal scene” from which—as from the scene of the crime in the detective story—“reality” assumes narratability, the signifying chain is established. We need to think further about the deathlike ending, its relation to origin, and to initiatory desire, and about how the interrelation of the two may determine and shape the middle—the “dilatory space” of postponement and error.

(96)

That “dilatory space” defines the plot's middle, filled, among other things, by repetitions; and as I have suggested, repetition, and especially its relation to both origin and end, is of particular interest in reading Irving's fiction.

Brooks places narrative desire in the context of what he calls “Freud's master-plot” (90-112), the scheme laid out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) to describe the complex movement of life from its beginning to its end. When Freud terms the repetition compulsion central to the psychic economy, he describes the compulsive acting out of repressed traumatic experiences as an effort to master the trauma, particularly of loss (Freud, Beyond 12-14 et passim). By repetition, an experience is made familiar, and hence brought from unconscious repression, through memory, into consciousness. For Brooks the repetition compulsion serves as a model for the “binding” together of textual energies into meaningful form. Narrative repetitions mediate between the textual desire to continue, to direct energies toward affirming a life principle (the textual eros), and the textual desire to reach the end, to cease in quiescence (the textual thanatos). Narrative form, bound together by its repetitions and symmetries, allows the text to “master” its diverse energies, thereby creating meaning (Brooks 101-02). “Meaning” can be seen as equivalent, in psychoanalytic terms, to the consciousness that arises from the memory-traces recovered during compulsive repetition (Freud, Beyond 19). The textual energies constituting plot (Brooks's “postponement” and “error”) relate not as mere contiguities or random additions, but in terms of similarity or substitution (Brooks 101)—that is, in terms of metaphor or metonymy.

The metaphoric and metonymic properties of narrative are eminently clear in the repetitions of Irving's novels. Not surprisingly, many of the motifs and “litanies” listed above emerge from his essential perception of the contained and uncontained dangers of the world, its physical and moral violence; the meaning of Irving's narratives is the “lunacy and sorrow” that Garp's biographer identifies when he titles his book about Garp. The traumas that compel repetition are suggested by the capacity for violence in animal nature (the bears), in human interactions (wrestling), or in human history (Vienna at the time of the Anschluss); even that archetype of safety, the womb, gathers to it violent meanings when Utch, in The 158-Pound Marriage, is “reborn” after hiding for several days during the war in the slit belly of a decomposing cow. Where many of Irving's characters attempt to lull themselves into confidence, to circumscribe their worlds into safe havens—hotels, padded wrestling rooms, small towns, isolated orphanages and apple orchards—the real precariousness of human existence always intrudes in the form of accident, random violence, and irruptions of irrational or unconscious impulses.²

Because they contain both the richest and the most schematic examples of narrative repetitions elucidating Irving's inquiry into deterministic plotting, The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany will receive full attention here. It may be no accident that these two novels in a sense bracket off the question of narrative desire by mirroring each other's plots. The World According to Garp is generated from an original act of violence—the rape and death of the man who gives his “last shot” (24) to be Garp's father. The narration of this act dominates the beginning of the novel, and the subsequent narrative shows its compulsive repetition in metaphoric dream, in metonymic events, and in the similitudes and substitutions of the fiction Garp writes. Where one might term this an originary narrative, unfolding as it does from Garp's conception, which is at the narrative's beginning and also the beginning of all his narratives, A Prayer for Owen Meany might be seen as an eschatological narrative, in several senses of the term. Owen Meany reverses the direction of the plot of Garp; its events—and its meaningful repetitions—develop backward in chronology and narrative time from the book's last things. The final scene in the book, in which Owen heroically but fatally leaps to stuff a grenade on a high ledge away from a roomful of children, is a culminating repetition that seems to confirm the possibility that there is a providential design to human action, because Owen has been practicing this leap—“the shot”—as a basketball move with his childhood friend for many years, without knowing why. That is, the ending of the novel supplies the reason for, and in formal, psychological, and spiritual terms the origin of, this narrative repetition. In just these two novels, then, Irving has shown plot spooling out from opposite directions—from beginnings, and from endings—in such a way that each narrative seems to loop back in on itself.

This symmetry is not the only surprising connection between Garp and Owen Meany; it seems hardly coincidental that a “shot” originates each. That Anglo-Saxon word neatly draws together the elements of the world according to Irving, in which sorrow floats: a shot signifies controlled violence (sport) and uncontrolled or willful violence (bloodshed), sex and death—all traumas that lie at the fountainhead of narrative. In each novel, as I hope to show, the “last shot” is the last plot.

The first novel in order of composition and the one that begins, so to speak, at the beginning, is The World According to Garp. The plotting of the novel reveals Garp's need to repeat—and so, perhaps, to master—the violence of his conception, which has been accomplished by the rape and death of a ball turret gunner, Technical Sergeant Garp. The first episode in Garp is the novel's “primal scene” in two senses of the term: it is an originating narrative episode, an opening “scene”; and it is the location of the primary psychological event of sex and death. It evokes as well that other primal scene described by Freud in Totem and Taboo (1913): the central myth of parricide in the primal horde that he postulates as the origin of culture (140-46) and the model for the repetition compulsion to which ritual sacrifice bears witness.³

The slain father carries mythic power in Irving's novel. Technical Sergeant Garp is both orphan—a cipher without origins—and absent father. He is the unknown quantity in Garp's life, the cryptic signified at the beginning of the signifying chain. Technical Sergeant Garp's flak wounds, received while he served as a machine-gunner in the ball turret of a plane over France, have rendered him able only to masturbate and to speak his own name. When his nurse, Jenny Fields, notices that he continues to have erections, he becomes the object of her maternal plans: she desires to conceive with “no strings attached. … An almost virgin birth” (12). As Technical Sergeant Garp nears his death, he regresses toward infancy, burping, crying, suckling at Jenny's breast, and losing one by one the letters of his name, calling himself “Arp,” then “Ar” (20-1). His name at last reduced to “Aaa” (22), a sound of ecstasy and pain, he simultaneously impregnates Jenny, who has straddled his erection, and reenters, in his memory, his mother's womb; he dies shortly after giving Jenny his “last shot.” Irving concentrates into the image of Technical Sergeant Garp's final ejaculation the traumas that he is at that moment repeating and that his son will be doomed to repeat in both his life's narrative and those he writes: physical violence, the violation of the self, the silencing of language, and the regression to memory. The narrative of the younger Garp, who is born in mythic fashion—of a kind of rape and, paradoxically, immaculate conception—has as its motivating desire the mastery of these elements of his own beginnings.

The narrative meanings of Garp's physiological origin are enriched by his other origin—the textual source, Randall Jarrell's poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” The poem reads:

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

(Jarrell 144)⁴

The poem sets up an analogy between birth and dying, one whose emphasis reads as readily from right to left as from left to right: the beginning is an ending, the end repeats the origin. The newborn man falls into the “State” from his “mother's sleep” just as, wounded fatally in the womblike ball turret, he is “loosed” from the State's “dream of life,” hosed from the turret and waking to death. Waking—being born, emerging out of innocence—and violent death are for Jarrell metaphors for each other. The meaning of the poem poises on the brink of its ambiguity; it does not come to rest at either possible term as the definitive tenor of the metaphor. Likewise, in The World According to Garp, meaning hovers in the “dilatory space” between repetitions of the novel's—and Garp's—beginnings, which are also his endings. For Garp will die, like his poetic father, in the womb—assassinated in the womblike wrestling room at the Steering School, where Garp began his life. Like the death of the paternal ball turret gunner, his death will follow a “last shot,” a literal gunshot that renders him speechless. Like Technical Sergeant Garp's death, too, Garp's ironically will issue in creative energy, as his succeeding generation achieves both the imaginative freedom and the social reorganization to which he had failed to open himself.

For Garp's repetitions are marked with failure; he becomes the exception that proves the rule of Freudian practice. Freud contends that the therapeutic task is to reconstruct experience through memory rather than simply to repeat in unconscious action what has been repressed (Beyond 12). The aim is to bring the repressed material to consciousness. Rather than mastering the scene of his traumatic origins, however, Garp is mastered. Irving's narrative compels Garp to repeat the initiatory trauma, but never to understand it, to bring it fully to consciousness, so as to gain power over it. Whereas the novel's events—the blinding of one son, the death of another, the assassination of his mother—imitate in one way or another the originating violence of his conception, the most provocative examples of the narrative's compulsion to repeat appear in the fiction that Garp writes. By creating Garp as a writer, Irving in a sense exemplifies the proximity of Brooks's metaphor for plot to the thing it signifies, the vehicle (mind) to the tenor (narrative). That is, Garp's psychic desires are represented not only in the narrative he lives, but also in the narratives he writes. Where Garp seeks in the imagination to provide coherence—a place of safety—within an existence that is ruled by free-floating sorrow, his fictive ordering of experience inescapably reproduces the world of uncontained extremity. Garp the dreamer is awakened by violence—rape of a woman or, figuratively, “rape” of a father. Awakened from his innocent sleep, like Jarrell's gunner, his waking knowledge must be knowledge of death. He supplies coherent meaning to his life only by reliving his father's death without recognizing his own repetitions. The meaning—death—is, of course, the ironic fulfillment of what was foreshadowed, the final repetition that gives authority to his narrative beginning.

Irving's irony is that Garp's subjugation to the Freudian plot denies him mastery over excess. Rather than providing release, memory is Garp's undoing. Insofar as he allows the past to resurface, it devours his imagination, leaving him nothing but the unmastered nightmares of rape and death. His fictions are directed always toward repeating the past, the site of remembered violence. Garp's search for an “overall scheme of things, a vision all his own” (Garp 110) to inform his fiction—the world view that is “according” to him—ends in a vision of extremity, based on the evidence of his own memory.⁵

In demonstrating that Garp's wounded imagination, like his life, authorizes his origin alone, Irving suggests the interrelatedness of psychological necessity and narrative desire. In trying to affirm and protect life, Garp writes about violence and death—sorrow floats always and everywhere. Garp's aesthetic progress inscribes a kind of reverse Kunstlerroman. His fiction declines as it develops generically from fantasy grounded in verisimilitude to graphic realism, while experience of the world impinges on his imagination. His plots repeat and prophesy. Violence writes Garp's progress much as flak, looking in the sky like “fast-moving ink flung upward” (15), ultimately wrote the death of the ball turret gunner.

Garp's first, juvenile story is a case in point. Irving's narrator summarizes the plot:

The story … was about two young lovers who are murdered in a cemetery by the girl's father, who thinks they are grave robbers. After this unfortunate error, the lovers are buried side by side; for some completely unknown reason, their graves are promptly robbed. It is not certain what becomes of the father—not to mention the grave robber.

(65)

Clearly, Garp's story is a fantasy of eros and thanatos: love literally in the place of death (the cemetery), death substituting figuratively in the place of love. Violence, although ascribed to chance, accident, and mistaken identity, looms large as a narrative judgment against love. Repetitions from Garp's life abound. The robbing of the graves is analogous to rape; stealing from the dead suggests the way Jenny Fields in effect “stole” Garp from the dying gunner. The father is a shadowy figure who becomes lost in the narrative, as Technical Sergeant Garp disappears early from Garp's life and from Irving's novel. The father furthermore prefigures Garp's actions: he is murderous when he means to protect, and he fails to accomplish what he set out to do (the graves are robbed anyway).

Whereas Garp's first tale is weakly gothic, the first story that appears in its entirety in the novel, “The Pension Grillparzer,” is a finely realized piece, an extended “dream of death” (97) that comes closest to mastering extremity within its narrative form. Noting that imagination “came harder than memory” (87), Garp nevertheless achieves in the texture of his youthful story of Vienna a balance between dream and realism and in his creative process a balance between his memory and imagination—an equilibrium he never regains.⁶ The centerpiece of “Grillparzer” is the dream of its narrator's grandmother, Johanna, yet another story within a story. Johanna's recurrent dream, like the desire that compels Garp to write the story, sets up a conflict that in Freudian terms might be seen as the tension in dream between wish fulfillment and the compulsion to repeat. It represents the opposition between imagination and memory, between the freedom of the formless future and bondage to a doomed past.

In the dream, a long-dead entourage of Charlemagne's crusading soldiers allow their horses to drink from the fountain of a castle in which Johanna herself is sleeping. With each subsequent repetition of the dream, the horses and men are colder, more gaunt, and fewer in number; the sound of the horses' breathing in the dream becomes congested. Clearly, the dream signifies death, looking both before and behind. In Garp's fiction, it points toward the future death of Johanna's husband, who dies of a respiratory infection. In the narrative of Garp's life, the dream foretells the fate of his as yet unborn son, Walt, who is suffering from a respiratory infection when he is killed in a car accident for which Garp is partly responsible. The sound of the running water in the fountain, which is developed as a metaphor for Johanna's anxiety (103-04), predicts Walt's mishearing of warnings against the ocean's undertow—and for Garp, the Under Toad (which we might wish to misread as the German Tod)⁷ signifies anxiety about death's capriciousness. Finally, the dream points back in time—and narrative levels—to Garp's origins in its suggestion of the confluence of violence and fulfillment. In her last repetition of the dream, Johanna sees the few remaining, starving soldiers make soup from bones, the intuited knowledge of whose source she tries to repress, choosing to think they are the bones of a wild animal rather than those of the missing soldiers (110). Johanna's dream soldiers literally cannibalize their own, just as Garp figuratively cannibalizes his experience to write his fictions. In this, Irving concurs with Freud: it is precisely the traumatic source material at the root of narrative that dreaming—and narrating—minds need to repress.

Irving also poses in Garp's story the problems of narrative authority and purpose. Johanna's dream is first narrated by the “dream man,” a member of a circus who, for his act, “tell[s] dreams” (102). The dream man tells dreams that have already been dreamt—that is, he repeats them in narrative. In this way he reminds us of the initiating act of narrative that, as Brooks points out, “always makes the implicit claim to be in a state of repetition, as a going over again of a ground already covered” (97). That is, narrative presupposes a story to tell, a story that already exists before its telling. The preexisting “story” in a dream is its latent content; in Johanna's dream, it is the story of her husband's death, and of her own anxiety about—and desire for—death. In a sense, then, Irving implies that plot is preexistent, determined in advance of its telling by repressed textual content, and that the teller therefore lacks autonomy, the full freedom of narrative choice.

“The Pension Grillparzer” not only supports a deterministic view of plotting, but it also works toward explaining the process and purpose of the repetition compulsion. The trick in Garp's story is that the dream man tells others' dreams as if they were his own, mysteriously enunciating, out of their silence, their most secret thoughts. Although he makes no pretense to interpret the dreams, his articulation of them inevitably recalls that other Viennese dream man, Sigmund Freud, as he brings dreams out from repression into the light of narration.⁸ In fact, his narrative repetition of Johanna's dream is a twofold effort toward mastery. First, the dream man's impulse is not toward attaining a final meaning, but toward extending the narration itself—to master the act of narrating—as well as toward asserting the authority of the dream's latent content. That is, his repetition affirms the reality of what Johanna's dream stands for: its intimations of death. Second, narration is for him, as for Freud, therapeutic. The dream man is attempting to “straighten” Johanna out by letting her know that she is not the only person to have had such dreams (122); like Freud, he tries to make her uncommon trauma over into common unhappiness. Johanna's response, however, provides a clue to her creator, Garp. To her, the dream man's narration of her private, unspoken dream of death is tantamount to rape, an attempt to gain authority over her narrative. She slaps him in outrage and calls his invasion of her subconscious, his reading of her internal narrative, “unspeakable” (108)—that is, not to be spoken, but to be repressed as might be any traumatic incident. Here, Garp equates psychic violation with physical violation, both standing together metonymically in “Grillparzer” for the initiating violation of the ball turret gunner. Paradoxically, both Garp and his creation, Johanna, attempt to maintain authority over their own narratives by refusing to release repressed trauma into consciousness. Where release would help them master the trauma, their refusal perpetuates their enslavement to the past's plots. In this contradiction, Irving suggests the narrative desire to avoid disclosing the meaning of repeated images and actions. That is, the narrator is compelled to continue the narrative indefinitely rather than to let it come to rest in the quiescence of closure, the time of epilogue, of “dust settling.”

Irving provides Garp's short story with its own epilogue, which predicts Garp's failure to master the “primal scene” through repetition. The imagination, represented by the circus performers, is subjugated by the excesses of the world in which they live. They and the narrator's family are variously destroyed or transformed into tawdry figures. Garp's narrator notes that “There was no one around to take liberties anymore” (128); autonomy has been erased. The story confirms the impossibility of wresting narrative authority from the determinations of past events: after Johanna dies, her daughter finds herself dreaming Johanna's dream (126). “Grillparzer” shifts to temporally distanced retrospective narration, eulogizing the power that imagination might have wielded in order to shape events, and thus provides a glimpse into Garp's world, as his wife, Helen, remarks (121). Garp's compulsion toward endless repetition, with ever fewer transformations between the latent content of his unconscious and the manifest content of his fictionalizing dreams of life, shows the repetition compulsion victor over the fulfillment of wishes as an explanation of Garp's dream-fictions. Like his father, he is rendered “speechless,” first physically, then aesthetically.

Irving demonstrates that Garp's artistic endings are prefigured by his beginnings when he interpolates in the narrative the opening chapters of Garp's novel, The World According to Bensenhaver. The title's echo of the title of Garp's life-narrative suggests the infinite regressions of a mirror-text, an embedded story that functions typically to comment upon, and at times to replicate, in disguised form, the narrative in which it is embedded.⁹ Here, however, there is little disguise. Garp's sensationalistic depiction of rape and murder in the mirror-text represents his virtually untransformed memories of violations of his family. Garp writes the novel after a car accident in which one son is killed, the other loses an eye, Garp's jaw is broken, and Helen bites off part of her tongue as well as three-quarters of the penis of the lover to whom she is bidding farewell. This last completed work, the least displaced from Garp's autobiography, is clearly a therapeutic project, an attempt both to recover and exorcise memory. Irving's remark to an interviewer suggests his belief that Garp's approach will not make the best art: “The whole basis of art is selectivity. There's nothing very selective about memory, especially when we remember traumatic events” (McCaffery 3).

Although it seems clear that the second of Garp's stories included in the novel, “Vigilance,” is a weak attempt—and Irving told Larry McCaffery that he had deliberately made “Vigilance” mediocre to “show how Garp had gotten off the track of creating a reality” (16)—readers have disagreed about whether Bensenhaver represents success or failure for Garp. Whereas Gabriel Miller asserts that “Garp loses control of his art in a convulsive outpouring of his personal feelings of outrage, revulsion, and despair” (111), Carol C. Harter and James R. Thompson counter that the novel “represents how the artist harnesses and gives shape to inchoate feelings. … [Garp] is able to create aesthetic distance from his material, even when that distance is mitigated by sympathy” (95-96).¹⁰ Certainly, Garp's graphic descriptions of violence are somewhat ameliorated by the oddly detached voices he supplies to his novel's victim, Hope, the police inspector, Bensenhaver, and his narrator, all of whom represent Garp's stated desire to find a distancing point of view. Nevertheless, Bensenhaver, who is the narrative surrogate for Garp's attempt at “objectivity,” is drawn into violence himself, his originally coherent vision distorted by memory of mayhem until he is compelled to repeat the murder that he had hoped to avert—like the father in Garp's juvenile story, and like Garp himself, with whom much of the blame for the fatal accident rests.

One might argue, then, that Garp's ironic exposure of Bensenhaver attests to his aesthetic distance from his source material. The narrator, however, remarks that “Garp had lost the freedom of imagining life truly … Garp could now be truthful only by remembering, and that method—as distinct from imagining—was not only psychologically harmful to him but far less fruitful” (376). The views of the narrator—who gains authority because he is nowhere the target of irony—are bolstered by Helen and by a critic whom Irving invents for the occasion. Without definitively proving or disproving the value of The World According to Bensenhaver as art, one must still see that, in compulsively repeating the traumas and failures of “objectivity” in both his immediate and originary past, Garp's narrative implies Irving's convictions about deterministic plotting. Irving is interested in the violation of Garp's imagination by remembered experience, a violence that he figures as rape. The rape scene in Bensenhaver draws heavily on the particulars of Helen's betrayal and the accident: the rapist physically resembles Helen's lover; Hope's husband, like Garp, has unwittingly seen the rapist's vehicle pass by with his wife in it; references to castration and fellatio recur; and Bensenhaver is accidentally responsible for the murder of Hope's husband, just as Garp has been responsible for his son's death. Although the violence of Garp's novel refers immediately to the accident that befell his family, the rape and death implicit in his origins take precedence over the whole trajectory of his narrative, just as they have dominated the narrative in which he exists. Even the denouement of Garp's novel replicates the originating exchange between violence and fertility of Technical Sergeant Garp's “last shot”: the death of Hope's husband, at the hands of the now paranoiacally insane Bensenhaver, releases her family from the “terrible anxiety” (321) that crippled them—much as Garp's family finds freedom of imagination and activity after he has been murdered. The beginnings close the circle around the endings.

The structure of A Prayer for Owen Meany is likewise circular, but in this novel, the determination of plot takes on a vastly different emphasis. Whereas The World According to Garp posits design as psychological entrapment, A Prayer for Owen Meany presents patterns of repetition as elements in a providential plan. Determinism can be teased out of the plot of Garp, as I have tried to show, by looking at the patterns of repetition and their relation to the thematic plan and psychological energies depicted in the novel; Owen Meany, however, has an inherently deterministic premise. That is, Irving means the repetitions in the novel to confirm Owen Meany's conviction, prompted by precognitive knowledge of his own future, that he has been ordained an instrument of God. Owen's “election” is, as it were, proven in the novel's climactic closing scene, where the major repeated elements—amputation, voice, the slam dunk shot, and allusions to Jesus—are brought together and “explained” by Owen's heroic rescue of a group of Vietnamese children from a grenade tossed into an airport bathroom. In this way, then, the whole of the plot may be seen to unwind, backward, from the requirements of its violent ending.

In many ways, it is this predestination plot that caused the novel to receive such mixed reviews.¹¹ Alfred Kazin, for one, questions the depth of Irving's theology:

There is something much too cute about Owen's conviction that since he can foretell so much he must be God's instrument. It never seems to occur to John Wheelwright [the narrator] … that his prophet Owen is caricaturing Calvinist predestination in the role of fortune-teller. To believe that everything is in God's hands hardly entitles anyone to believe that everything is determined in advance and that he knows exactly what will happen. This is astrology and denies the principle of free will.

(30)

Without taking up the theological debate, one can see the point in Kazin's assertion—Irving wishes in the novel to deny the principle of free will as it is represented by the development of plot. Irving asks a lot. His novel seems to suggest that spiritual meaning is discoverable only in the human recognition of a miracle that portends providential design—a divine plot—and that necessarily erases the possibility of fully autonomous choice. A Prayer for Owen Meany is, in a sense, a prayer for meaning, for events to add up into a purposeful design. The yearning for religiosity, for an intuition of meaningfulness, is epitomized in the novel by a mute object, a statue in a schoolyard:

In all of Gravesend, the object that most attracted Owen's contempt was the stone statue of Mary Magdalene, the reformed prostitute who guarded the playground of St. Michael's—the parochial school. The life-sized statue stood in a meaningless cement archway—“meaningless” because the archway led nowhere; it was a gate without a place to be admitted to; it was an entrance without a house.

(Owen Meany 243)

Irving's novel attempts to find where the archway leads, to be admitted to a place, to restore the meaning that has been stripped from this icon, and though perhaps lacking theological sophistication (or, as Kazin charges, irony [30]), it is, like Garp, an earnest plea for a vision that will make sense of a world of otherwise random violence. By this token, the pun in the title implies that the novel is not just, in the conventional sense, a prayer said for the soul of a dead young man, but it is a prayer to discover the “meaning” that Owen Meany's name—and life—limn.

The miracle that Irving chooses to supply meaning—Owen's foreknowledge of events—is also peculiarly apt for testing the workings of narrative desire, because plot is a temporal phenomenon. First, foreknowledge is, in narrative terms, the mirror image of memory, because both involve a linear relationship between knowledge and time, one relating knowledge to the past, the other to the future. The temporality of narrative is therefore another reason that the plotting of A Prayer for Owen Meany reverses that of The World According to Garp. As Irving's novels imply, then, the compulsion to repeat derives either from what has happened or what must happen. Second, plot necessitates both the suppression and revelation of knowledge. Because Owen is prophetic, Irving's calculations involve what and how much knowledge to reveal as well as when to reveal it, so as to sustain the possibility of Owen's precognitions until their fulfillment. In this regard, Irving's remark to Michael Anderson is telling: he noted that it was “the element of precognition in the Gospels that appealed to his artistic imagination” (30). That is, A Prayer for Owen Meany is perhaps driven as much by an aesthetic as by a spiritual conviction—by a desire to contrive a “miracle” that would seem to justify deterministic plotting. The book raises the question: what happens to narrative form if a character knows his own ending?

One of the risks Irving takes, as I suggested earlier, is that the “miraculous” repetition of event from foreknowledge and symbolic motif into a narrative's “actuality,” which so obviously counters commonsense expectations of verisimilitude, will cause readers to displace the uncanny feeling that arises with a judgment against the narrative's contrivances. Recurrence is, of course, at the center of Freud's insights about the source of the uncanny, and it may be useful to summarize part of his argument in order to see how it explains the uneven reception of A Prayer for Owen Meany. Freud observes that the uncanny is the result of “involuntary repetition” (“The ‘Uncanny’” [1919] 237); having postulated the principle of the repetition compulsion, he concludes that “whatever reminds us of this inner ‘compulsion to repeat’ is perceived as uncanny” (238). More specifically, he asserts that “this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (241). Finally, in trying to explain why “in the realm of fiction many things are not uncanny which would be so if they happened in real life” (250), Freud concludes that “The uncanny … retains its character not only in experience but in fiction as well, so long as the setting is one of material reality; but where it is given an arbitrary and artificial setting in fiction [as in fairy tales], it is apt to lose that character” (251). When Irving created uncanny effects in The World According to Garp, he did so, for example, in “The Pension Grillparzer,” where we encounter the meaningful recurrences of Johanna's dream and the dream man's “unspeakable” ability to tell it; but this story is clearly, in Freud's terms, “artificial,” and so the effects are simultaneously preserved and tamed in such a way that we absorb among the narrative's conventions what is potentially uncanny. Likewise, in the narrative of Garp's life, the self-fulfilling repetitions of violence, whose visitations conform to the novel's originating episode, are conventionalized by both the eccentricities of the novel's cast and the context of the pervasively violent world.

A Prayer for Owen Meany, however, maintains “material reality” except in the distinctive way it repeats the signs of Owen's prophecy as they both defer meaning and develop toward their fulfillment in the climactic scene. The novel thus retains its uncanny effect, resisting our efforts to naturalize its anomalies. The compulsive repetitions cannot be fully understood except in retrospect, once we have reached the end of the narrative—that is, once the repressed “memory-trace,” which in this context is the knowledge of the future, has been restored by being enacted in present time. This uncanny effect must surely have been Irving's intention, because what is at stake in the novel is faith, and Irving's conception of faith, he has intimated, relies on the miraculous: “I've always asked myself what would be the magnitude of the miracle that could convince me of religious faith” (Bernstein C13). How then to represent miracle within his customary mode of comic realism provides Irving with his primary challenge in the novel. As Owen Meany himself says, disparaging Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, and in the capital letters that signify his “wrecked voice” (Owen Meany 13), “YOU CAN'T TAKE A MIRACLE AND JUST SHOW IT! … YOU CAN'T PROVE A MIRACLE—YOU JUST HAVE TO BELIEVE IT! IF THE RED SEA ACTUALLY PARTED, IT DIDN'T LOOK LIKE THAT. … IT DIDN'T LOOK LIKE ANYTHING—IT'S NOT A PICTURE ANYONE CAN EVEN IMAGINE” (245).

Irving's answer to his aesthetic problem of how to imagine the unimaginable is end-determined plotting, wherein secular coincidences reach toward saintly enactment. Repeated elements can be readily explained within their immediate contexts, but when they drive more and more obviously toward the end, they gather uncanny force, which strips them of their limited resonances until we are inclined to read them only in terms of their anticipated realization. In this sense the novel might be said to begin at its ending. The most encompassing example occurs in the link between the first and last chapters. The central event of chapter 1 is the death of Tabby Wheelwright, the narrator's mother, when a foul ball hit by Owen during a Little League game strikes her in the temple. This death, which anyone might term an accident, is what first seems to provoke Owen toward seeing a divine plan at work in his life, causing him to refer to it as “THAT FATED BASEBALL” and to become furious when John, the book's narrator, “suggested that anything was an ‘accident’” (99). One could reasonably argue that psychological necessity alone lies behind Owen's search for the sacred—that he is, naturally enough, impelled by guilt over killing his best friend's mother—and Irving leaves that possibility open through much of the novel. In this respect, the novel might be seen to resemble Garp in evolving from an initiatory act of violence. Following that “accident,” Owen's precognitions can be explained plausibly without appealing to providential design. The gravestone on which he sees his date of death during a theatrical performance of Dickens's A Christmas Carol; his compulsion to practice “the shot”; his diary entries in which he records what he “knows,” including “THAT I AM GOD'S INSTRUMENT” (326); and, most specifically, the dream he relates to John that includes most of the details of his heroic death (419-20)—all of these might be determined by his guilt, which causes him to desire both punishment and exoneration. By its last chapter, however, the book narrows the range of interpretation. Here, the final “foul ball” in Owen's life—the tossed grenade, which he slam dunks onto a high window ledge—legitimates, at least for John Wheelwright, Owen's conviction that he has been chosen as an instrument of God, and that he has been given the gift of foresight into his own instrumentality. It is this last shot that bestows meaning on all that has gone before.

In narrative terms, then, the repetitions have been required—or, perhaps, foreseen—by the ending, and one of Irving's main concerns has been how to weave them in so as to ensure the uncanny effect that will justify the narrator's subsequent conviction of faith. Irving has said that his “major preoccupation, his most time-consuming task … is fashioning his characters and devising his plots, making sure that what appear to be throwaway details early on in the book pop up again as crucial elements of the story later on” (Bernstein C17); but his task, in this case, is also to build the case for foreknowledge gradually, so that readers will find the miracle at the end—the confirmation of Owen's precognition—convincing. The result is a series of motifs, some of them apparently random or for local comic effect, others more noticeably cumulative. In each case, the figure, symbol, or event is realized in the novel's closing scene, so that the revealed “divine plot” explains the compulsiveness of the repetitions. In a sense, the narrative's repressed “memory” may appropriately be said to comprise both violence and the meaningful context for violence found in the Christian conventions of martyrdom. For it is in hagiographic narrative, and particularly in prefigurative readings of biblical texts, that one finds the end directing the interpretation of the beginning and middle, investing isolated details with spiritual significance.

A Prayer for Owen Meany, however, more specifically represents repression in the narrator himself. In the opening sentence of the novel, John writes:

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God.

(13)

This first sentence steers quickly away from the weight of the elegiac opening clause, which implies that this narrative is a memory of someone who has been lost. The paragraph continues in a rush of details so that the opening note of grief is easily forgotten, an account of its cause evaded. In fact, the essential piece of the puzzle—John's witness of the miracle, which also necessitates Owen's death—is suppressed in the narrative until its close. The narrative's suppression indicates the narrator's, and it continues even when he reaches the point at which the scene must be narrated.¹² John tells the aftermath of Owen's death first, putting the epilogue before the climax, so that the event of the death is known long before its facts. Just before he narrates the climactic scene, John's language reveals his contradictory response to the trauma:

Let's see: there's not much else—there's almost nothing to add. Only this: that it took years for me to face my memory of how Owen Meany died—and once I forced myself to remember the details, I could never forget how he died; I will never forget it. I am doomed to remember this.

(506)

The closing echo of John's introductory statement—his doom—placed against the casual disclaimer of the first sentence (“there's not much else”) reinforces that this suppressed narrative is the source of all the compulsive repetitions in A Prayer for Owen Meany. The “mind” of both text and narrator struggle to bring it forth, as both horribly painful and necessary origin of all plot.

One telling sequence of repetitions begins early in the first chapter of A Prayer for Owen Meany. When John provides historical information about the New Hampshire town in which much of the action takes place, he includes a description of the local Indian sagamore, Watahantowet, whose totem was an armless man (19). Later, after John's mother has been killed by the foul ball, he and Owen negotiate their guilt and forgiveness by an exchange of prized property; when Owen returns John's stuffed armadillo, the front claws have been removed (85). After Tabby Wheelwright's death, Owen becomes attached to her dressmaker's dummy—similarly armless—and keeps it with him while he grows up, as a totemic reminder of his fate and of one of his earliest visions, when he thought he saw the angel of death hovering across Tabby's bed from the dummy (98-99). Even the above-mentioned statue of Mary Magdalene appears with her arms removed, when Owen wreaks his revenge against the unjust headmaster of his prep school (357). Each of these references makes secular sense in its context. Watahantowet provides ironic historical commentary on the arrival of Europeans among the peaceful Indians, as preparation for John's tirades against the violence and exploitations of contemporary American culture. The armadillo, as John's stepfather suggests, represents Owen's feeling that he has lost a part of himself with Tabby's death (85), and that he wishes he might obliterate his own hands, the agents of that death. The dummy connects him with his surrogate mother. And the statue of Mary Magdalene provides an appropriate stab at the headmaster's hypocrisy. All of these armless figures, however, prefigure Owen's fate. The repetitions prepare for the miraculous effects of his last act, when he traps the grenade against the very high window ledge with both hands and forearms so that it will not fall back into the room (539); when the grenade explodes, it amputates both of Owen's arms. He bleeds to death, but not before seeing that his action has saved the children and others gathered in the makeshift men's room.

Part of the power of the final repetition, and what makes it more convincingly miraculous, is that up until the end, even Owen cannot feel absolutely certain of the truth of his foreknowledge. For while he has had precognitive knowledge of his heroic action, it has been incomplete. He knows the date of his death and a number of its circumstances, but, like any text, his visions of the future have gaps, leaving room for interpretation—and, as it happens, for misinterpretation. Because his visions involve Vietnamese children, he assumes that the event must occur in Vietnam; when he finds himself on his foreseen date of death in Phoenix, he loses some of his certainty. Because this room for doubt matches and maintains the reader's uncertainty about the direction of the novel, it works to legitimize the final miraculousness of Owen's foresight.

Irving gathers up a number of other motifs in the final scene as well—these are obvious enough to need little explication. Owen's unchanging, “wrecked voice,” which results because his Adam's apple is positioned in a “permanent scream” (315), is explained when he must speak to the Vietnamese children in their language; they trust and obey him, because “it was a voice like their voices” (538). Owen has been “afraid of nuns” (244); nuns are escorting the Vietnamese orphans through the airport, and a nun embraces Owen as he dies. Similarly, Owen and John have for many years made a game of practicing “the shot,” the slam dunk maneuver enabling Owen, who is preternaturally small, to shoot a basket; they have worked to make it as fast and efficient as possible. “The shot” requires John to toss the ball to Owen, who leaps into John's arms and is propelled upward toward the basket; when a young homicidal maniac throws a grenade at John in the Arizona men's room, he and Owen do the maneuver in order to protect the room's inhabitants. Irving has emphasized each of these elements in the text—possibly drawing too much attention to them—so that their realization in the climactic scene will not be missed. But perhaps the most obvious web of motifs—and the one most difficult for many readers to accept¹³—comprises the references, both overt and covert, to the life of Jesus.

In a sense, these repetitions provide a clue to how to read the novel. Some are local metaphors, and only in retrospect suggest Owen's saintly predestination, such as when John writes that solely by “some miracle” did Owen manage as a young child to catch a baseball (16); or when Owen, having played a trick on John while they swim in a granite quarry, becomes angry and says “REMEMBER THAT: YOU LET ME DIE” (30); or when at his first meeting with John's cousins, Owen looks like “a descending angel—a tiny but fiery god, sent to adjudicate the errors of our ways” (71). But these references begin both to gather force and to strain credibility by the time that Owen appears, at the age of eleven (during the year of the fatal foul ball), as the baby Jesus in the Sunday school Christmas pageant or when, in describing Owen's expulsion from prep school, John writes that “they crucified him” (354). Our incredulity is probably greatest when Mr. Meany assures John after Owen's death that Owen was immaculately conceived (473)—like Garp, the issue of a virgin birth. Irving accomplishes several things in these accumulating allusions, however. First, with repetition they become self-conscious references, and so move toward ironizing their content, even as they tend, in the voice of the narrator, to retain their innocence enough to be suggestive of “truth.” This doubling of the interpretive possibilities underscores the difficulty of faith—and the need for accepting the miraculous—because there is always the opportunity to discount miracle by an ironic interpretation. Our incredulity here is the point. Irving must encourage us to disbelieve in order to urge us to believe. Second, the repeated allusions contribute to the comedy in A Prayer for Owen Meany. By the time we read the late discussion of Owen's virgin birth, the references have become predictable; the writer who builds in the expectation of a repeated event or line is using one of the key conventions of the comic. Most important, however, is that Irving shows us the way John, as narrator, casts the plot in terms of his own religious conversion. It is John's linguistic choices and emphases that connect Owen to sainthood—it is he who has “learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye” (361)—and his narrative decisions serve the novel's ending by confirming Owen's precognitions.

John Wheelwright's teleological sense of how to govern the “dilatory space” of the narrative's middle is revealed in numerous comments that seem obvious or coy foreshadowings. About the coach who told Owen Meany to “Swing away” at the fateful baseball, he notes that “Had he known everything that would follow, he would have bathed his chubby face in even more tears” (123). At the end of a chapter, he claims that “I have been ‘moved to do evil,’ too—as you shall soon see” (136). He observes of the summer when he and Owen turned eighteen that “nothing seemed dangerous. That was the summer we registered for the draft, too; it was no big deal” (290). In each case, Irving reminds us, as he had in the dream man's narrations of “The Pension Grillparzer,” of the status of narration as a retrospective act. That is, from the privileged position of the end of events, a narrator can shape the plot toward his or her interpretation of the whole. As with the references to Jesus, then, Irving tries to have it both ways—to remind us of the mechanics of plotting the novel, that plotting is a self-conscious activity, and to prepare for the uncanny effects of the final scene. This is his answer to the question of what happens to narrative form if a character knows his own ending: the plot must be deterministic.

There are, of course, important differences between already-known meaning—ordained by God or, simply, invented by an author—and that which is forecast overtly to a reader rather than unfolding fully only by narrative's end, or, for that matter, that which is never fully revealed. Irving's decision to foreground these differences signifies his interest in exploring how narrative creates meaning. But he chooses to do his experiments within the context of realist conventions, and that qualification is significant. Even as he experiments, Irving stands in opposition to the postmodern literary culture that has questioned the referential meaning of language and, in turn, the connection between representation and human value. At this point, Robert Caserio's opening insight in Plot, Story, and the Novel is useful. He writes:

Walter Benjamin thought that when we lose interest in stories and story-telling we lose the ability to exchange experiences. It is perhaps more significant that when writers and readers of novels lose interest in plot and story, they appear to lose faith in the meaning and the moral value of acts.

(13)

Irving's concentration on some of the features of narrative desire suggest that he is committed to restoring “faith in the meaning and the moral value of acts.” In the world according to Irving, acts mean because they form larger patterns of intentional design. In both Garp and Owen Meany, the compulsive repetitions open the door to understanding how acts are meaningful for Irving, because these repetitions are functioning within a closed scheme, directed either toward the origins or the end of the narrative. In this respect, his plotting of the fiction uncovers its ethical dimension. But Irving also exposes the epistemological dimension of narrative when he demonstrates the way plot itself constructs knowledge and belief. Garp's fictions purport to imagine a world and John Wheelwright's tale aims to represent one transparently, but each of them can only narrate the world that is “according” to him. For both, the point of view is inevitably limited to compulsive repetitions of traumas. The “last shot” is the last plot in the narratives John and Garp write and in those they live. Irving represents in this the way fictional narrative constructs its meanings deterministically. More generally, his novels define a circle in the way we structure the stories of our lives: our knowledge and experience always shape and are shaped by our already known patterns of meaning.

Notes

1. Others have noted Irving's penchant for verbal refrains as well as for repeated actions; see, for example, Reilly 8-9 and Harter and Thompson 17.

2. The youthful “road” novel Setting Free the Bears (1968) is a singular exception; its narrator, Graff, seems to fling himself out upon the world, looking for trouble. After a series of comically violent misadventures, however, he learns that the freedom to define one's identify (the archetypal theme of the “road” novel) must be accompanied by responsibility for mayhem. The process of maturation implied by this first novel shows the initial stage in Irving's development toward representing, in his later novels, the futile attempt to avert mayhem.

3. See also Rene Girard's discussion of sacrifice and the symbolic process in Violence and the Sacred, passim.

4. “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” from The Complete Poems by Randall Jarrell. Copyright © 1945 by Randall Jarrell, renewed © 1972 by Mrs. Randall Jarrell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

5. George V. Griffith's insight that Jarrell's ball turret gunner provides an analogue for the artist is useful in this respect; the gunner's awakening into violence is equivalent metaphorically to Garp's awakening as a writer into the world of extremity. See “Jarrell According to Garp.” See also Barbara Lounsberry. “The Terrible Under Toad: Violence as Excessive Imagination in The World According to Garp,” for an extended discussion of the various excesses that permeate Garp's imagination and his world.

6. Michael Priestley notes that Garp perpetually struggles “between the power of his imagination and that of his memory / When his imagination is in control, he can draw on his own experiences and write brilliantly: when his memory dominates, he can write only ‘x-rated soap operas’ (Garp 322) which too closely resemble his own life” (“Structure” 90).

7. Gabriel Miller also points out the linguistic echo (92), which would, of course, have meaning for Garp, that sojourner in Vienna.

8. Whereas Irving's debt to the explanatory force of Freudian doctrine is evident in a variety of ways in his novels, perhaps the clearest precedent for testing his fiction against psychoanalytic theory is his decision to name a character in The Hotel New Hampshire—a mysterious figure, perhaps magician, perhaps swindler, certainly a figure of paternal authority—after Freud.

9. For a description of the mirror-text, see Mieke Bal 142-46.

10. Michael Priestly also argues for Miller's point. See his comments, cited in note 5.

11. Although a number of reviewers praised Irving's inventiveness and comedy, others evaluated the novel as “cute,” discursive, and unpersuasive in its religious thematizing—charges that are in some respects defensible. For a useful summary of reviewers' responses to A Prayer for Owen Meany, see Reilly 141-43.

12. Irving has prepared for John Wheelwright's repression of this traumatic memory by having him likewise refer to his repression of the event of his mother's death: “So many of the details surrounding that game would take years to remember” (80).

13. See, for example, Alfred Kazin's remark that the “heavily emphasized ‘religious’ symbols at the center of the book … [remind] this long-tried teacher of all the ‘Christ symbols’ his students find in everything and anything they have to read” (30).

Works Cited

Anderson, Michael. “Casting Doubt on Atheism.” New York Times Book Review 12 Mar. 1989: 30.

Bal, Mieke, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Trans. Christine van Boheemen. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985.

Bernstein, Richard. “John Irving: 19th-Century Novelist for These Times.” New York Times 25 Apr. 1989: C13, C17.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Random, 1984.

Caserio, Robert L. Plot, Story, and the Novel: From Dickens and Poe to the Modern Period. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1950. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York: Liveright, 1970.

———. Totem and Toboo and Other Works. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth P, 1955. Vol. 13 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. 1953-74.

———. “The ‘Uncanny.’” An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth P, 1955. Vol. 17 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. 1953-74.

Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977.

Griffith, George V. “Jarrell According to Garp.” Notes on Modern American Literature 5 (Summer 1981): Item 20.

Hansen, Ron. “The Art of Fiction XCIII: John Irving.” Paris Review 28.100 (1986): 74-103.

Harter, Carol C. and James R. Thompson. John Irving. Boston: Twayne, 1986.

Irving, John. The Cider House Rules. New York: Morrow, 1985.

———. The Hotel New Hampshire. New York: Dutton, 1981.

———. The 158-Pound Marriage. New York: Random, 1974.

———. A Prayer for Owen Meany. New York: Morrow, 1989.

———. Setting Free the Bears. New York: Random, 1968.

———. The Water-Method Man. New York: Random, 1972.

———. The World According to Garp. New York: Dutton, 1978.

Jarrell, Randall. The Complete Poems. New York: Farrar, 1969.

Kazin, Alfred. “God's Own Little Squirt.” New York Times Book Review. 12 March 1989: 1, 30-31.

Lounsberry, Barbara. “The Terrible Under Toad: Violence as Excessive Imagination in The World According to Garp.” Thalia 5.2 (Fall-Winter 1982-83): 30-5.

McCaffery, Larry. “An Interview with John Irving.” Contemporary Literature 23.1 (1982): 1-18.

Miller, Gabriel. John Irving. New York: Ungar, 1982.

Priestley, Michael. “An Interview with John Irving.” The New England Review 1.4 (1979): 489-504.

———. “Structure in the Worlds of John Irving.” Critique 23.1 (1981): 82-96.

Reilly, Edward C. Understanding John Irving. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1991.

Renwick, Joyce. “John Irving: An Interview.” Fictional International 14 (1982): 5-18.