An Ellen Jamesian attacks Garp with a car

An Ellen Jamesian attacks Garp with a car in an attempted assassination that makes the danger of motor traffic personal to a man who has spent years confronting speeding drivers. On a run between Steering and Dog’s Head Harbor, Garp spots a dirty-white Saab returning toward him, remembers its driver’s earlier maneuver, and escapes its deliberate charge. The Saab crashes into a stone wall; its driver dies, and the papers she carried disclose her identification with Ellen James and the reasoning behind her attack. Garp survives and takes the evidence to the police rather than suppressing it.

Background: Garp and the road

Garp’s confrontation with the Saab grows out of a persistent concern with cars and the risks they impose on children and pedestrians. He runs five miles daily, often meeting motorists who ask what he is training for. His answer is that he is staying in shape to chase cars, though he distinguishes the open road, where he keeps to the shoulder and lets motorists go, from his neighborhood, where he pursues speeders.

The suburbs, in his account, are a poor place to run: short blocks, frequent stop signs, dogs, children’s playthings, sprinklers, and elderly pedestrians make the sidewalks difficult. On the open road, however, he believes that a speeding driver in his neighborhood can be caught. He crosses lawns and porches, passes through hedges and children’s play areas, and says that drivers usually learn not to speed there. His daily running therefore serves both as exercise and as preparation for an informal campaign to protect neighborhood children.

Garp’s vigilance is not a general rejection of cars in every setting. He concedes that the open road belongs to drivers and does not chase them there. At night, when he believes cars dominate the modern world, he does not pursue them. The Saab attack reverses his usual arrangement: on the country road where he is running, he becomes the pedestrian exposed to a car’s force.

The run and the attempted attack

Garp is alone on the road to Dog’s Head Harbor, where he intends to turn around near the halfway point and run back to Steering. The dirty-white Saab passes him, appears to slow, and then moves ahead and out of sight. At first, nothing about the encounter seems conclusive. Garp runs on the left side of the road so that approaching cars are visible, while the Saab passes on the right, in its proper lane.

As the Saab approaches again, Garp initially gives it little attention. He is watching a herd of Angus cattle beside a low stone wall and has moved onto the dusty shoulder. His memory of the first pass changes the course of the encounter: he recalls the car slowing and the driver’s head seeming to line him up in the rearview mirror. That remembered detail alerts him to the threat before the car reaches him.

The Saab is coasting toward Garp with its engine off. He runs for the stone wall and vaults it, only then noticing the electric fence above it. He clears both obstacles and lands in the field. The Saab strikes the wall, dislodging two boulders. Garp understands that he has escaped; the blood in his mouth comes from biting his lip, not from a grave injury.

The driver and the evidence

Garp approaches the wreck and finds the driver dead. He identifies her as an Ellen Jamesian from the evidence of her mouth, and searches her purse. It contains a notepad and pencil as well as used and unused notes. One appears to be an introductory note, and Garp imagines that the woman had intended to place it on him after leaving him dead by the roadside.

Another note gives her own account of her affiliation: “I have never been raped, and I have never wanted to be. I have never been with a man, and I have never wanted to be, either. My whole life’s meaning has been to share the suffering of Ellen James.” The statement makes the driver’s identification and motive legible through her chosen words. Her solidarity with Ellen James is presented as an adopted commitment, not a claim that she experienced the same assault.

Garp leaves the note among the driver’s belongings for others to discover. He is unwilling to hide what he considers an important message, even one he regards as insane. The decision preserves the evidence of the attacker’s self-explanation while exposing the contradiction between her declared commitment to sharing another person’s suffering and her own attempt to kill Garp.

Aftermath and narrative significance

The collision leaves Garp with an aggravated old groin injury from vaulting the wall and fence, but he is able to jog back toward town. A yogurt truck picks him up, and he and the driver go together to tell the police. The report makes the attack an investigated event rather than a private encounter concealed from public view.

The scene also brings together two recurring kinds of danger in Garp’s life: the force of cars and the consequences of his conflict with Ellen Jamesians. Earlier, a low-speed collision involving a Buick and the Volvo had seriously injured members of his family; here, the Saab’s deliberate attack makes a vehicle a weapon aimed directly at him. The car is no longer merely the neighborhood threat Garp chases or the source of an accident: it is the means by which an ideological opponent attempts to kill him.

The attack is narrowly averted because Garp remembers an apparently minor detail from the Saab’s first pass. That act of recollection, rather than strength or speed alone, gives him the chance to escape. In its aftermath, the dead driver’s notes bring the conflict into view while leaving Garp alive to carry the evidence to the police.