Irving, John: *1942

The World According to Garp, 1978 - Thematic Parallels: Absurdity

Irving, John: The World According to Garp, 1978
The topic of the novel is the struggle to make sense of life’s chaos, violence, and absurdity, especially within the realms of family, art, and social change.
The following books are thematically similar. They lend themselves well to being read in groups, compared with one another, or used to teach a similar topic over an extended period with a class:
- Auster, Paul: The Music of Chance, 1990, ~210pp
  This novel features incomprehensible events and characters caught in bizarre, almost dreamlike predicaments—a hallmark of the absurd.
  - Both novels wrestle with chance, absurdity, violence, and the struggle to impose meaning on a chaotic world. Auster does it with stripped-down existential allegory; Irving with sprawling comic-tragic family saga—but they converge on the idea that life is unpredictable, and we live in the shadow of chance.
- McCabe, Patrick: The Butcher Boy, 1992, ~210pp
  This novel’s protagonist experiences extreme alienation from society, shifting between reality and delusion in a darkly comic and disturbing way. The narrative’s bleakness and fragmentary style echo absurdist concerns, though it’s rooted in Irish social realism rather than pure absurdism.
  - Both novels suggest that childhood environment profoundly shapes adult identity, for better or worse. They explore how damaged families, blurred reality, grotesque violence, and overpowering mothers shape men who exist at the margins of society—mixing dark comedy with tragedy.
- Sillitoe, Alan: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, 1959, ~170pp
  This novel's themes of alienation and rebellion fit with existential and absurdist motifs.
  - Both works explore how an individual maintains integrity and autonomy against the pressures of social institutions. They use protagonists to dramatize rebellion against societal expectations, the search for authenticity, and the absurd difficulty of living with integrity.
- Wyndham, John: The Day of the Triffids, 1951, ~270pp
  A novel with surreal and post-apocalyptic elements which involves absurd conditions.
  - Both novels ask: How do we live meaningfully in a dangerous, unpredictable world? While "The Day of the Triffids" is about killer plants and the end of civilization, and "The World According to Garp" about a writer’s messy personal life, both novels grapple with survival, randomness, gender, and resilience in a world that resists control.
List of general discussion questions on Absurdity (pdf)
List of essay prompts on Absurdity (pdf)