Bears as a recurring motif

Bears are a recurring motif in T. S. Garp’s writing, linking his early struggle to make a story from what he observes with the later fiction’s patterns of vulnerability, failed action, and death. From a circus bear whose performance stalls at a railroad station to Duna’s long decline in The Pension Grillparzer, and finally to imagined bears in Procrastination, they appear not as a stable symbol with one meaning but as particular animals caught in human systems of care, spectacle, and neglect.

First encounters and the problem of making a story

While traveling in Europe, Garp watches a four-member circus unload at a railroad station. Its bear rides a motorcycle in circles around a parking lot while a man walks on his hands and collects money. The performance falters: both performer and bear fall, the motorcycle eventually will not start, and the crowd disperses when police arrive to require paperwork from the remaining circus members. Garp stays longer than the spectacle merits because he is trying to imagine how to use it in a story, but he cannot find a shape for what he has seen. As he leaves, he hears the bear being sick; observation has supplied a memorable detail, not yet a working plot.

For weeks, the only progress Garp makes is a title, “The Austrian Tourist Bureau.” Dissatisfied with it, he gives up writing for tourism. The delay matters to the motif’s beginnings: the bear first enters his imagination as part of a disjointed, declining performance, difficult to convert into fiction. It is not simply the strangeness of the act that holds his attention; it is the gap between what he witnesses and the story he cannot yet make from it.

Duna and The Pension Grillparzer

Garp eventually develops that early image into The Pension Grillparzer, a story whose narrator recounts his family’s travels with his father, an Austrian Tourist Bureau inspector. The tale’s bear, Duna, belongs to the struggling Circus Szolnok and lives within the household and business of a pension. The bear’s presence initially seems almost impossible: the narrator finds a unicycle outside a dark washroom, sees feet that cannot belong to a man in a costume, and concludes that the occupant is a real bear. The discovery turns the circus image into a domestic one. Duna is not merely an attraction on a roadside circuit but an animal sharing cramped human arrangements.

The story stresses Duna’s dependence and diminished capacities. Herr Theobald is afraid of him because he obeys the sister who has trained him, while the hand-walking performer insists that Duna is male, gentle, and safe: he has no claws and few teeth. Theobald acknowledges that the bear is old, messy, and has difficulty eating. In his father’s notes, the narrator describes the group as a depressed bear and an unemployed circus, with the family centered on the sister. That observation frames Duna’s place in a household organized around a caretaker, while also making the bear’s condition part of the story’s account of the group’s stagnation.

Duna’s performances give the motif a mixture of comedy and pathos. On the sidewalk he pedals between parking meters, sometimes resting a paw against one as he turns. His keeper controls him with a leash, but the control is only nominal: when she calls him over, he begins to show off, pedaling faster and veering among the meters until he crashes against a parked car. No one laughs. The sister approaches him gently, wipes saliva from his fur, and is pushed away. The brief fall is not a triumphant comic trick; it exposes how readily performance can become humiliation, even when the animal has not been hurt. Earlier, Duna hands the narrator the car keys, a gesture that makes the bear seem included in the family’s practical life as well as its spectacle.

Decline, exclusion, and death

The later account of the pension turns the motif toward loss. By the narrator’s return, the pension has fallen from its rating and the sister’s former appeal has given way to a harder life of management. Herr Theobald is dead: investigating what he believes is a prowler, he encounters Duna wearing the absent dream performer’s pin-striped suit. The account connects the bear to Theobald’s sudden death, though it does not establish why the sister dressed him that way. The bear’s presence has become at once familiar and alarming, an everyday consequence of the circus family’s strange domestic arrangements.

The human performers also disappear or meet disastrous ends. The singer has left, and the dreamer has been taken to an institution after nightmares disrupt the pension. The hand-walker dies when his clothing becomes caught in an escalator, a mechanism ill-suited to someone who moves on his hands. Around Duna, too, the circumstances grow harsher. As management weighs more heavily on the sister, she has less time to care for him; he grows senile, and after he drives a mailman down a marble staircase, an ordinance against unrestrained animals in public places is enforced. Duna is excluded from the pension.

For a time, the sister keeps Duna in a courtyard cage, where dogs and children taunt him and food is thrown in from overlooking apartments. He becomes wary, is poisoned twice, and eventually is donated to Schönbrunn Zoo despite doubts about his age, health, and ability to adapt. His years of being treated as a human companion have not prepared him for the zoo’s routine. The one skill that had defined his public life, unicycling, is no longer available to him: weakened by conditions in the courtyard, he falls when he tries the act at the zoo. Someone laughs, and, according to the sister, Duna will not perform it again once it has made him an object of laughter.

Duna dies at the zoo two months after arriving. The sister attributes his death to mortification after a rash spreads across his chest and his fur has to be shaved; this remains her explanation, not an objective diagnosis. The narrator finds Duna’s cage empty except for a mound of old droppings, a remainder that makes absence materially visible. He thinks of Robo, the bear in the earlier family story, and notes that Duna has left more remains. The comparison binds the narrative’s remembered animal to the later, lost one, while refusing to turn the bear’s death into a clean or consoling resolution.

Bears in Procrastination

Bears recur in Garp’s later novel Procrastination, set in Vienna during the war years and the Soviet occupation. Its young anarchist, who works at Schönbrunn Zoo, waits too long to act against the Nazis. When starvation makes raids on the zoo a source of food, he decides to release its remaining animals. They are themselves starving, however, and eat him; a hungry mob then kills the escaped animals. The novel’s terse judgment that this was natural makes the bears and other animals part of a chain in which human political inaction and hunger do not spare the nonhuman world.

The anarchist’s mother survives and later returns to Schönbrunn Zoo, remembering her secret visits to her son during the war. The Hungarian Revolution prompts her to attempt the same gesture of liberation, releasing animals to jolt a complacent city into recognizing the danger of passivity. But the zoo has changed: its animals are well fed, few leave their cages, and those that do are easily confined within the grounds and returned unharmed. An elderly bear suffers severe diarrhea, the story’s only lasting animal consequence of the attempted release. The contrast with the wartime episode is sharp: the mother repeats the form of her son’s action, but it can no longer produce the same effects.

After her arrest, the mother is found to have cancer and dies in a private hospital. In her death dream, she imagines a pair of young Asiatic black bears escaping and multiplying into a new species in the Danube valley. The imagined future briefly opens beyond the failures of the earlier liberation attempts, but the novel marks it as her imagination, not an event in the shared world. It ends instead with the death of the elderly bear at Schönbrunn, followed by a reviewer’s sardonic conclusion, “So much for revolution in modern times.” The dream of multiplying bears and the actual death of one bear sit side by side, leaving hope present but explicitly unrealized.

Narrative function

Across these stories, bears shift from spectacle to companions and finally to casualties of circumstances they do not control. Duna’s training and household life give him specific habits and relations, but those arrangements cannot protect him once age, neglect, regulation, and institutional relocation alter his world. In Procrastination, the animals’ vulnerability is tied to the consequences of human political and social failure, while the bear in the mother’s dream offers an alternative only within the limits of imagination.

The recurring motif also records Garp’s development as a writer. The railroad-station circus first appears as material he cannot organize; its bear returns in The Pension Grillparzer as the center of an elaborated narrative, and bears later become part of Procrastination’s historical and political design. Their recurrence does not resolve into a single allegory. Instead, the stories repeatedly test the distance between watching an animal, making it perform, caring for it, and imagining it free—and show how easily those human meanings are overtaken by the animal’s actual vulnerability.