The role and function of violence in the novel `The World According to Garp`

John Irvings notoriety as a novelist rests at least parti aloney upon his admirable ability to fuse the peculiar and tragic in fiction, often within the same sketch or scene. His persistent imaging of the soaked and sublime as conjoined twin alludes to a more profound and probing set of themes in his make fiction.In his novel, The realness check to Garp the apparent domesticity of the storys characters and settings prove little protection against the forces of sentence or circumstance which collide repeatedly with the domestic surface of the novel, many times in irruptions of rage, with much of that violence seeming to be ergodic or bizarre. The function and role of violence in The World match to Garp is manifold however, one of the primary functions of Irvings continuous depiction of violence is to lay out the topsy-turvydom and hit-or-miss dangers of the universe.The point of violence in The World According to Garp is not only to instruct readers about possible sociolo gical and honourable breeches in contemporary society, exactly to remind readers of the primal, seemingly random violence which fills the universe itself. One way of depicting violence in the novel is to show a darkly humourous, al nigh slapstick mint of violence, as in the infamous Michael Milton castration scene where one of the novels darkest and most tragic moments is simultaneously offset by the humor of the situation his appendage being bitten off in a car while winning in an extramarital affair.There is simultaneously a notion of poetic evaluator in this scene, only also of devastating almost unimaginable tragedy which shatters the surface of the domestic scene. This juxtapositioning of violence with comic-tragic experience is continuous end-to-end the novel. The introduction of bizarre violence and the associated vein of black humor, even in the frontmost section of the book, contributes to irony. The novel opens to the backdrop of a war, and Jenny Fieldss brusque categorizing of the injure The Role and Function of Violence in The World According to Garp rascal -2-into classes of Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners certainly contains an element of the blackly humorous. (Wilson, 1992, p. 55) In one way or another, each of the characters in The World According to Garp is seen to be either a victim of violence, usually chaotic violence, living in the aftermath of their experience, or as a victim (unknowingly) headed for a violent encounter, or both. The thought of violence as ubiquitous, but ultimately unpredictable and unaccountable, reinforces the cosmic or universal scope of the primal element of violence discussed previously.This primal indescribable power, the power of random violent tragedy is typeized by Walts mis-hearing of the word sea puss which he mistakenly calls Under Toad. The Under Toad becomes a near-archetypal vision of cosmic disorder and brutality. Walts malapropism becomes a catchphrase that the Garp famil y uses to refer to threatening danger, violence, and death. The randomness and suddenness of death are brought to our attention at the really beginning of the novel when Garps father, the ball-turret gunner, becomes a Goner. Although violence and death abound in Irving first novel, Setting Free the Bears, in Garp there is one cataclysm after another. (Campbell, 1998, p. 81) The universal presence of violence and disorder becomes associated, through its duck hunting into the every day settings and characters, with a primitive, natural force, something which impacts humanity and flows through them but issues, perhaps, from a more cosmically primitive level. One way the natural gaucheness of violence is expressed in The World According to Garp is through the familiarity of violence with sex.Whatever the The Role and Function of Violence in The World According to Garp page -3-connection, sex and violence are related throughout the novel, and Garp finds himself confronting them at nearly every turn. (Campbell, 1998, p. 83) This association allows Irving to demonstrate that primal, chaotic violence exists as an intrinsic part of the universal paradigm and finds oblique, often absurd and even humorous expression through human events. In this way, violence, worry death and birth, love and sex, is viewed as an endemic force of nature.As a symbol for Irvings cosmic paradigm, the rassling room at Steering college offers a manifold and complete statement, symbolically, for Irvings cosmic vision. Here, in a place created for violent confrontation, all of the major events of a tone, Garps life, emanate. It is not only where Garp learns how to wrestle and feels at home, but also where he proposes to Helen Holm. It is, further, the space that Pooh Percy enters, in a nurses uniform (like his mothers), and kills Garp. (Campbell, 1998, p.75)The wrestling room becomes a microcosm, a stage whereupon the great, often absurd, dramas of a life are enacted, but it is a plac e of competition, of struggle, and ultimately of death. The cycle which tie in sex and violence, death and birth, continues in Garps stream of consciousness even as he lays dying, showing how individuality is subsumed under the larger, cosmic processes. Garp thinks Even if there is only death after death (after death), be grateful for low-spirited favors sometimes there is birth after sex, for example.And if you are very fortunate, sometimes there is sex after birth (Irving, 576). Irvings use of violence in The World According to Garp is extensive, varied, and intense. The modes of violence in the novel range from the comic to the harrowingly tragic and often involve two or modes simultaneously. Irvings purpose in depicting violence in this way is to establish violence and chaos as an integral part of the universe inhabited by humanity, whose parochial and myopic visions partake of, but are incapable of fully comprehending the universal forces which shape their lives.