“Most of you know who I am”

“Most of you know who I am” is Jenny Fields’s final public statement, spoken moments before she is shot at a gathering in a parking lot. Its afterlife is intimate rather than triumphant: crossing the Atlantic with his family, T. S. Garp repeats the words to himself, and Helen reaches across the aisle to hold his hand. The phrase joins Jenny’s public self-presentation to Garp’s private grief, becoming the last words by which he understands her.

The speech and the shooting

Jenny speaks from the tailgate of a pickup truck, after Roberta Muldoon lifts her up and adjusts the microphone. In her white uniform, she appears small beside Roberta but sharply visible against the gathering. The crowd answers her opening declaration, “I am Jenny Fields,” with cheers, whistles, and hoots; horns blare as pickup trucks circle the lot and police order them to move on. The trucks move away and return, while Jenny continues: “Most of you know who I am.”

The line is followed by more cheers and hoots, then a single gunshot. No one sees where it comes from. A dark mark appears on Jenny’s white uniform, and Roberta catches her under the arms, carries her down from the tailgate, and pushes through the crowd. When a police car intercepts them, Roberta holds Jenny’s body toward it; a policeman helps them into the car. The televised scene then shifts to apparent gunfire among the circling trucks and police cars, and later shows a dead man in a hunting coat and a close-up of a deer rifle. The weapon and the sequence suggest the shooting’s circumstances, but the account does not show the shot being fired or identify its source directly.

The phrase on the flight home

Garp, Helen, Duncan, and baby Jenny have watched the news from a Viennese pension, where their bewildered landlady serves coffee and little cakes; only Duncan eats. After thanking her, the family travels through Frankfurt and changes planes for New York. The Under Toad is absent from the flight, even for Helen, who fears flying, and for a while the family feels that it is elsewhere.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, Garp thinks that his mother has delivered adequate last words. He repeats her sentence in a whisper: “Most of you know who I am.” Duncan is asleep, but Helen hears him and reaches across the aisle to take his hand. The moment gives the public phrase a family setting: Jenny’s words have passed from the spectacle of the parking lot into the quiet of the airplane, where they prompt no speech from Helen, only contact.

Meaning and narrative role

Jenny’s sentence asserts identity before a crowd that responds to her in competing ways—cheering, hooting, and surrounding her with the noise of circling trucks. Its plainness becomes starkly final when the gunshot interrupts the gathering. The words do not prevent her death, and the scene does not present them as a declaration that resolves the turmoil around her. Instead, their force comes from the gap between the self Jenny names and the sudden violence that ends her speech.

For Garp, repeating the line is an act of immediate remembrance. He is crying as the plane brings him home, and the thought of his mother’s final words accompanies his recognition that he will become famous in his violent country. The sentence therefore links Jenny’s public death with the family’s return and Garp’s own exposure to violence. Its recurrence is brief but consequential: the words survive the interrupted speech as the phrase through which her son carries her home.