Bears

Bears recur in The World According to Garp not as a single symbolic creature but as particular animals caught in human arrangements. Duna, an old bear trained to ride a unicycle, is treated as performer, household presence, and dependent; his fortunes worsen as the circus family loses its place at the Pension Grillparzer. His decline culminates in a short, unhappy stay at Schönbrunn Zoo. In Garp’s embedded novel Procrastination, another bear’s death gives the book its bleak closing image, while an imagined release of bears offers a counterpoint to political passivity.

Duna: A Bear in Human Company

The child narrator first identifies Duna through the feet visible beneath a dark washroom door. The bear has no claws, but the narrator’s observations of its fur and smell establish that the occupant is an actual bear, not a person in a costume. Its presence in the washroom, and its ability to flush the toilet repeatedly, make it at once a startling intrusion and a creature accustomed to domestic space. The inference that it is housebroken points to the unusual boundary Duna occupies: he is a bear, but he has been trained to live among people.

The household’s reaction confirms that Duna is known to the circus family. As the child’s father rushes through a doorway, Duna emerges from the washroom, stumbles over the unicycle, and calls out to him. A woman then calls down the hall for Duna, identifying the bear as a member of the family’s everyday world rather than a passing spectacle. The scene’s comedy depends on the collapse of ordinary categories—bathroom occupant, circus animal, and household companion—without making Duna any less an animal.

Performance and Dependence

In the morning, Duna rides his unicycle along the sidewalk while his sister follows with him on a leash. The leash is required by law, but it offers only nominal control: the bear pedals from parking meter to parking meter, leaning on one as he turns. His skill is unmistakable, yet the narrator also sees that unicycling has become a dead end for him. The act that makes him remarkable is also the narrow role available to him.

When Duna’s sister calls him over, he pedals listlessly and licks the face of a parking meter. After she tugs the leash, he begins to show off, steering quickly among the meters until she has to let go. He loses control near the curb and falls against a parked car. Though apparently unhurt, he looks embarrassed; no one laughs. His sister crouches beside him, wipes saliva from his fur, and gently reproves him, while Duna pushes her hand away. The exchange gives the performance a personal dimension: Duna responds to an audience, but also resists his sister’s attention, and his actions are not simply tricks arranged for human amusement.

The scene also registers the bear’s dependence on the people around him. His sister tends him and keeps him on a leash, while the hotel manager worries that the bear is driving away customers from the pastry shop next door. Another circus man insists that the bear attracts them. Duna’s place in the street is thus contested in terms of both care and business: he belongs to the family, but his presence is also judged by its effect on the establishment’s trade.

Exclusion, Confinement, and Death

As responsibility for the Pension Grillparzer falls more heavily on Duna’s sister, she has less time to care for him. Duna grows senile and develops difficult habits. After he drives a mailman down a marble staircase and the man breaks his hip, authorities enforce an old ordinance against unrestrained animals in public places. Duna is no longer permitted at the Pension Grillparzer, turning an animal once accommodated within the family’s living and working environment into a problem to be removed.

For a time, his sister keeps him in a courtyard cage. The setting exposes him to taunts from dogs and children and to objects dropped into the enclosure from the apartments above. Duna becomes wary, pretending to sleep, and eats most of someone’s cat. After he is poisoned twice, he becomes afraid to eat. These conditions leave the family with no alternative but to give him to Schönbrunn Zoo, although his age, toothlessness, illness, and uncertain health make even his acceptance doubtful. A life spent being treated partly as a human companion has not prepared him for the zoo’s routine.

Duna’s courtyard quarters have worsened his rheumatism, and he can no longer recover his one celebrated skill. When he tries to ride a unicycle at the zoo, he falls; someone laughs, and, as his sister explains, Duna will never repeat an act once anyone has laughed at it. His last transfer therefore removes not only his familiar surroundings but the performance through which he had been known. He becomes a charity case and dies two months after arriving. His sister attributes his death to mortification after a rash across his chest has to be shaved; a zoo official likewise describes the shaved bear as dying of embarrassment. The differing accounts do not change the material sequence of exclusion, deteriorating health, failed performance, and death.

Afterward, the narrator looks into Duna’s empty courtyard cage. Its remaining mound of droppings contrasts with the missing animal and prompts him to think of Robo: the dead bear has left more remains. The image makes the cage a trace of a life that had been managed, watched, and confined by people, but is now absent. It also shifts the scene from the comic strangeness of Duna’s routines to the irreversibility of his loss.

Bears in Procrastination

Bears appear again in Procrastination, the novel Garp writes within the novel. In its historical plot, a woman releases animals from Schönbrunn Zoo in an attempt to rouse a complacent city after the Hungarian Revolution brings a new wave of refugees to Vienna. The gesture echoes an earlier attempt by her son to release the animals, but the zoo animals are now well fed and content. Only a few leave their cages; they are easily contained in the zoo’s paths and gardens and returned unharmed. One elderly bear suffers a severe bout of diarrhea, and the attempted liberation changes little.

The woman imagines, in her death dream, that two young Asiatic Black Bears escape. In her vision they survive and multiply until they become famous as a new species in the Danube valley. The imagined success sharply contrasts with the animals’ actual return to their cages: in the dream, release produces a lasting new life, while in the narrated event the attempt is ineffectual. The elderly bear’s death after the woman’s own death supplies the novel’s final image, giving the revolutionary gesture an ending that is both ironic and unresolved.

The Bear Motif and Human Control

Across these episodes, bears are shaped by human rules and expectations: Duna is taught to perform, required to follow a leash law, expelled under an old ordinance, confined in a courtyard, and transferred to a zoo. The account does not reduce his life to a simple emblem; its distinct details—his listless pedaling, his refusal to look at his sister after falling, and his unwillingness to repeat a trick once laughed at—present him as responsive to the people and circumstances around him. Yet the people who care for him cannot protect him from the systems that decide where he may live or what he is expected to do.

The contrast between Duna’s fate and the imagined bears in Procrastination extends the motif beyond private loss. Duna’s shrinking world ends in death after confinement and failed adjustment; the dream bears, by contrast, escape, survive, and multiply. But that hopeful possibility belongs to a death dream, while the actual release of the zoo animals is quickly reversed. In both the embedded novel and Duna’s story, the distance between human intention and an animal’s life remains central: care and liberation may be sincerely meant, yet neither guarantees freedom or survival.