Dean Bodger

Dean Bodger is the dean and campus-policing presence at the Steering School, a man whose conviction that danger can be anticipated shapes both his authority and his care for others. His trajectory turns that anxious vigilance into personal loyalty: first to Jenny Fields and Garp, and later to Garp’s family, until the old dean’s devotion to the school and its wrestling world becomes part of his final scene.

Identity and Campus Role

Bodger’s night patrols make him a familiar force on campus. He drives a dark car along footpaths and over lawns, sweeping a spotlight across shrubs in search of students out after curfew. The grounds crew complains about his driving, while the patrol itself makes the campus inhospitable to people lingering outdoors, whether they are breaking rules or simply looking for a private place to meet. His authority is thus practical and intrusive at once: he tries to make the grounds safe by watching them closely, but his vigilance also governs ordinary student life.

The narrative describes Bodger as brave and tenacious, a father of four children raised with rigor. His policing comes less from a wish to suppress enjoyment than from a deep belief that almost every accident could be prevented through preparation and effort. That belief gives his work its earnestness and its limits. He is prepared, in his anxious imagination, to catch a falling child; the possibility of disaster seems to him a problem that readiness might solve.

Jenny Fields and Garp

Bodger becomes one of the few people at the Steering School to win Jenny’s regard. After an incident involving Garp, he offers to reprimand the boy if Jenny thinks the dean’s authority would leave a stronger impression than her own. They agree on a threat intended to make that impression, and Bodger then asks to speak with Garp alone. The exchange shows him not simply enforcing discipline but coordinating with Jenny, respecting her judgment about how her son should be approached.

His effort to help Garp is earnest, but it also foreshadows the gap between Bodger’s confidence in prevention and the uncertainty of what actually happens. Later, Garp writes that Bodger meant well and questions the dean’s sense of what really occurs. Bodger comes to believe that he caught young Garp falling from the infirmary annex roof. In fact, he caught a pigeon, not Garp. In his later years, however, the rescue becomes fixed in his memory as an act of saving the boy; Garp recognizes that the imagined event may have mattered to Bodger as much as the real one would have.

Loyalty Through the Family’s Crises

Bodger’s connection to Garp’s family persists long after Garp has grown. When Helen cannot reach her father, Ernie Holm, she tells Garp that she has called Bodger and asked him to help find him. The request places the dean within the family’s circle of trust: his old campus role has developed into an expectation that he will respond when someone is missing or a crisis arises.

When Garp returns to Ernie’s house, Bodger is there, waiting. He accepts Garp’s appearance without making it the focus of the encounter and explains that he stayed so the children could ask for help without waking Helen, who has been given something to help her sleep. He offers Garp sympathy and says that troubles can sometimes seem to arrive together. The scene presents his care in unassuming terms: staying in the house, watching over the children, and allowing Helen to rest.

Bodger also remembers Jenny with admiration. He calls her a fighter and says she was someone special, recalling that he still has copies of notes she wrote to Stewart Percy. His respect for her links his school years with the family’s wider history and reflects the regard Jenny had earned from him. Later, when a wrestling gathering needs another participant, Bodger volunteers to fill the necessary fourth place, again stepping into a practical role rather than remaining a distant observer.

Garp’s Wrestling World and Bodger’s Ending

In Garp’s later years, Bodger continues to visit the wrestling room, where he sees Garp at ease in his element. After a recent hospital stay for a heart complaint, he encounters Garp at Buster’s Snack and Grill and praises him to Donald Whitcomb. Garp is embarrassed but plainly pleased by the praise. Bodger promises to bring the knit hat Garp has forgotten to the gym, a small errand that becomes charged with meaning in retrospect.

Whitcomb later learns that Garp has died. Bodger, red-eyed and looking suddenly older, stops him on his way to the dining hall. The dean is still carrying Garp’s hat, having left his gloves at the gym. Whitcomb understands from the hat and Bodger’s expression that something is wrong before he is told. The object Bodger had meant to return becomes a quiet sign of his loyalty and of the sudden absence he has come to announce.

After retirement, Bodger does not give up his night patrols. He continues to roam the Steering campus, unable to sleep, occasionally catching people on the footpaths as he had done during his working years. He dies at a wrestling match, standing to urge on the competitors in a close unlimited-class bout. Even at the end, his attention is fixed on the contest and his response is physical and immediate: he rises, stamps, and calls encouragement as the clock runs down. The life organized around watching, anticipating, and intervening closes in the place where he had found Garp most fully himself.