Attempted assassination of T. S. Garp in a white Saab

The attempted assassination of T. S. Garp in a white Saab occurs during a solitary run between Steering and Dog’s Head Harbor. A driver who had passed him once returns with the engine off and aims the car at him; Garp escapes over a stone wall, and the Saab crashes. The driver is killed, and evidence in her belongings identifies her as an Ellen Jamesian. The episode turns Garp’s sustained concern about cars and their threat to people into a direct attack, while leaving him to confront the lethal consequences of the conflict his public words have helped intensify.

Background: Running Against the Car

Garp’s running has long been bound up with the danger posed by motorists. When a driver asks what he is training for, Garp says he is staying in shape to chase cars. The answer conceals a serious distinction: on open roads, he does not pursue motorists, but in his neighborhood he does chase drivers who speed. He trains on the open road, he explains, because the suburbs are what he is preparing to defend.

That vigilance has practical roots in a neighborhood where children play and cars must repeatedly slow for intersections. Garp believes he can catch a speeding car by cutting across lawns, porches, hedges, and children’s play areas, rather than stopping at the stop signs that constrain drivers. He confronts motorists in a beseeching voice, asking them not to speed where children live. In his view, a car’s dominance is conditional: it may rule the open road, but not yet his neighborhood. He also recognizes a limit to his campaign, and does not chase cars at night, when he believes the car is king even in the suburbs.

The Run and the Attack

The encounter takes place on a road running from Steering toward Dog’s Head Harbor. Garp is alone, approaching the halfway point before turning back, when a dirty-white Saab passes him, seems to slow, and then continues out of sight. It has passed in its proper lane; at first, nothing about the movement seems plainly suspicious.

Garp’s recollection of that first pass becomes decisive. As the Saab approaches him again, he remembers that it had slowed and that the driver’s head seemed to be lining him up in the rearview mirror. He looks away from the cattle he has been watching and sees the Saab coasting silently toward him along the soft shoulder, its engine cut. The deliberate change in the car’s course transforms an apparently ordinary encounter on the road into an attack.

Garp reacts by bounding over a stone wall and an electric fence. The Saab strikes the wall, and the driver dies in the crash. Garp initially knows he has survived and approaches the wreck. He identifies the dead driver as an Ellen Jamesian by looking at her mouth, then searches her purse. It contains a notepad and pencil, along with used and unused notes. One note explains that the writer had never been raped and had never been with a man, but had devoted her life to sharing Ellen James’s suffering. The driver’s identity and stated purpose are thus established through the belongings she left behind, rather than through any conversation with Garp.

Aftermath and the Ellen Jamesians

The crash leaves Garp with an aggravated old groin injury, but he is able to jog back toward town. A yogurt truck picks him up, and he and its driver go together to inform the police. By the time the truck passes the crash site, the Angus cattle have escaped through the damaged stone wall and gathered around the Saab. The scene joins the consequences of the car’s violence to the rural landscape through which Garp had been running.

The attack also reverberates beyond the road. A spokesperson for the Ellen Jamesians calls it an isolated act, says it was not authorized by the group, and nevertheless claims it was provoked by Garp’s aggressive, supposedly rapist character. The statement disclaims responsibility without expressing surprise or particular sorrow. It does not establish that the group organized the attack; instead, it displays the hostile logic through which the movement’s representative addresses Garp and the violence committed in its name.

Helen experiences the event as a private shock. Awake beside Garp afterward, she wonders whether the dead Ellen Jamesian was the Under Toad, embraces him, and holds him so tightly that he wakes. She cannot put her fear into words; Garp holds her until she stops shivering. Her response makes the attempted assassination part of the family’s intimate life, not merely a confrontation between Garp and his attackers.

Significance: A Threat Made Immediate

The episode brings Garp’s recurring concern about cars into sharp focus. Earlier, he has treated the speeding automobile as a danger that can be challenged through vigilance, physical effort, and appeals made for children’s safety. Here, a car is no longer only a neighborhood hazard or an emblem of modern power: it is deliberately used against him. The prior pass, remembered at the crucial moment, supplies the clue that allows him to escape.

The attack also places his public denunciation of the Ellen Jamesians beside its consequences without making the dead driver’s act representative of the movement as a whole. Her notes disclose a personal commitment to sharing Ellen James’s suffering; the spokesperson’s response, meanwhile, rejects formal responsibility while turning the accusation back on Garp. The scene’s outcome is starkly divided: Garp survives and reaches help, the driver dies, and Helen’s wordless embrace registers how close the violence has come to the people around him.