In The World According to Garp, the deaths of novelist T.S. Garp, and 33 years earlier, his father Technical Sergeant Garp (whose first name we never know) are both memorable.
Technical Sergeant Garp, a ball turret gunner, is mortally wounded in a World War II dogfight, and badly brain-damaged. He has recurrent priapic episodes but is not fully conscious and can only speak the word "Garp." Nurse Jenny Fields, from an aristocratic New England family, cares for him as he slips out of this world. She notices, as he begins to fail, that first he loses the G, and can only say "Arp." Soon he loses the P, and she knows she is losing him.
Once a Garp, then an Arp, now only an Ar; she knew he was dying. He had just one vowel and one consonant left.
Jenny, eager for a baby, climbs atop the dying gunner and uses his arousal reflex to impregnate herself. A few weeks later he is dead. She never reveals the identity of her baby's father to her family, but she names her son T.S. Garp in his father's memory, and raises him as a single mother.
Garp is a successful writer, but he becomes controversial. He criticizes a group of young women who call themselves the Ellen James Society, named for a young rape survivor whose assailant had cut out her tongue with the intention of preventing her from testifying against him; the Ellen Jamesians voluntarily cut out their own tongues in solidarity. Garp fails to see the point in this self-mutilation and is eventually assassinated by an exceptionally crazy Ellen Jamesian.
- Stephanie Vardavas
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