The redemptive imagination: The fiction of John Irving.

Abstract

Using Richard Rorty's Contingency, Solidarity and Irony, John Barth's "The Literature of Replenishment," and Christian theology as frames of reference, this thesis argues that Irving recognizes the contingency of language systems which shape our personal and public networks of "beliefs, desires and experiences" and presents the imagination, which enters into, selects, and shapes various public and private "texts," as a moral and unifying force. From The Water-Method Man, The World According to Garp, and The Hotel New Hampshire through to The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and A Son of the Circus. Irving's view of the intertextual relationship between the imagination, metafiction and morality evolves. In his later novels, Irving suggests that ironic questioning of "final vocabularies" leads to both personal freedom and an increased tolerance for others. Thus, this thesis argues that Irving employs post-modernist means to present what is, in effect, a Romantic-humanist view of the world.