Duncan Garp

Duncan Garp, the elder son of T. S. Garp and Helen Holm, is a reserved child whose life is decisively altered by a car crash that costs him his right eye. The injury redirects his relationship to sport and to the world around him, but also becomes the beginning of an artistic vision: first through a camera, then in paintings that make family memory visible. He survives further injury, becomes a serious painter and an early practitioner of color photography, and carries his family’s history into work marked by both exact observation and the persistent absence of his younger brother Walt.

Identity and Early Family Life

Duncan is the Garps’ first son. When Walt is born, the family becomes a household of two boys; Duncan is ten when Walt is still young enough to be collected from school and to need his father’s care. Duncan’s appearance resembles Helen’s: he has her delicate, bony face, oval yellow-brown eyes, and light-oak skin. From Garp, he has inherited nervousness, stubbornness, and moods of black self-pity. The combination makes him a child whose inward reserve contrasts with Walt’s more daring physical confidence.

Duncan’s quietness is apparent in scenes where he does not readily ask for help. In a dream of Garp’s, the ten-year-old is sent alone down an airplane aisle to find the lavatory. He reaches the doors but cannot decide which one to choose, then looks back helplessly rather than asking the stewardess. The dream sharpens a quality Helen later describes as a longstanding timidity and reserve, not simply a consequence of injury: Duncan could be coordinated and good at games without entering them with the energy Walt brought to every new circumstance.

That reserve does not mean he is emotionally detached. When Garp remembers the family’s summers at Dog’s Head Harbor, Duncan’s account of warning Walt about the undertow shows how attentively he has kept the family’s repeated phrases. He remembers the warnings from the years when Walt was small enough to retreat from the water, turning a familiar caution into a shared family story. Later, when Garp is preoccupied and has forgotten to collect Walt, Duncan asks about his brother and joins Garp in going to get him. Garp throws away the phone book he had been consulting, and father and son walk together to the bus stop.

The Crash and Its Aftermath

The collision that injures Duncan is forceful even though the Volvo is estimated to be moving no faster than twenty-five to thirty-five miles per hour. The three-ton Buick does not give way, and the passengers in the Volvo are thrown about by the impact. Duncan is flung forward between the bucket seats. The exposed tip of the shift shaft breaks his fall, gouging out his right eye; his right hand is caught in the seat-belt release mechanism, and three fingers are broken. Garp reaches toward the gap but is too late to prevent the injury.

The family’s recovery takes place at Dog’s Head Harbor, where the sea’s sound becomes inseparable, for Duncan, from convalescence. Jenny Fields removes his bandage and tends the wound herself, able to look steadily at the empty socket when his parents cannot bear the sight. She shows him his first glass eye, brown and large, and tells him to make sure girls see his left eye first. The practical advice is characteristically Jenny’s: she is a nurse before anything else, and her care begins with facing the wound rather than looking away from it.

Helen spends much of the recovery beside Duncan, reading to him in his room. From there he watches the sea with his remaining eye, as if he were a camera. The comparison gives his changed sight a concrete form: one-eyed vision entails new problems of focus and depth, not merely the loss of an eye. Helen buys him a single-lens reflex camera because its way of seeing makes sense to him. Duncan is almost eleven when the thought of becoming an artist, painter, and photographer first occurs to him.

The injury also changes his physical life. Duncan had been athletic, but afterward he is wary of sports involving balls and says that running feels clumsy because he lacks peripheral vision. Wrestling troubles him for a more specific reason: he cannot judge how far away the mat is, and describes the uncertainty as feeling like going downstairs in the dark without knowing where the bottom lies until he reaches it. Garp assumes the accident has made him insecure about sports; Helen answers that Duncan had always been more reserved than Walt. The distinction matters: the crash intensifies a difficulty, but it does not explain the whole of Duncan’s temperament.

Seeing, Memory, and Family

Duncan describes his missing eye not only as an absence but as a strange persistence. Sometimes, he says, it feels as if he can still see from it; what he sees is like memory rather than something real. Garp suggests that it has become the eye with which Duncan sees his dreams. Duncan agrees only partly: the experience still seems real. The exchange gives language to an unsettled boundary between perception and recollection, a boundary that later returns in his art.

When the family prepares to leave for Europe, Duncan asks for a window seat on the left side of the airplane. A stewardess tells him the right side is just as nice, and he pleasantly points out that he has no right eye. Garp admires the boy’s new boldness about himself. The remark is neither a denial of disability nor a claim that it has ceased to matter; it is a concise act of self-possession, delivered without apology.

After Walt’s death, the family’s history of warning him about the undertow acquires a devastating double meaning. In the remembered summer routine, Duncan had repeated the cautions that his parents had long given him, and Walt had obediently retreated from the water. The story survives as a family anecdote, but its recurrence also shows how ordinary acts of protection can become charged by loss. Duncan’s attention to those remembered words belongs to the same impulse that will later drive him to preserve family members in images.

Duncan is introduced to Ellen James as another child of injury: he is one-eyed, and she has lost her tongue. She becomes an older sister to him and a fellow member of the maimed society to which he shyly belongs. Their connection is built through shared activities rather than through speech alone. Ellen helps him with homework, while Duncan draws her into swimming and photography. Garp builds them a darkroom in the Steering mansion, where Duncan talks continuously about lenses and light as Ellen answers with wordless sounds of delight.

The two also make a short film together. They write and act in a story about a blind prince whose sight is partly restored when a young cleaning woman kisses him on the cheek; because she has lost her tongue, she is embarrassed to kiss him on the lips. The couple marries despite their impairments and compromises. Ellen writes subtitles, and the story unfolds through pantomime and text. Duncan later judges its seven-minute length as its best feature. The film gives their different forms of communication a shared artistic shape without pretending that either disability disappears.

The Artist and the Family Archive

Duncan’s first sustained artistic practice grows from the camera Helen gives him during his recovery. He becomes a serious painter and a pioneer in the artistically suspect field of color photography, bringing a painter’s attention to color and his father’s insistent, personal vision to both media. His images are not nonsense or abstraction for its own sake; they have an eerie, sensual, nearly narrative realism. Critics call the work too literal, a judgment that Duncan meets with humor, asking what anyone expects of a one-eyed, one-armed artist and the son of Garp.

One of his best-known bodies of work, the roughly hundred paintings in the series Family Album, is modeled on photographs he took as a child after losing his eye. The subjects include Roberta Muldoon, his grandmother Jenny Fields, his mother swimming at Dog’s Head Harbor, and his father running along the beach with his jaw healed. The paintings do more than record likenesses: they make the family’s shared past available as a sequence of images, seen from the perspective of the child who began photographing it while recovering.

A related series consists of twelve small paintings of the dirty-white Saab. Duncan calls it The Colors of the World, explaining that all the colors of the world can be seen in the twelve versions of the car. The vehicle is transformed through repeated looking rather than replaced by a more conventionally beautiful subject. In a body of work rooted in family photographs, this series extends the same insistence: close attention can disclose variation and meaning in an object that first appears to have only one color.

Duncan’s art also preserves what cannot be photographed directly. In large group portraits, many of them imagined rather than copied from photographs, critics notice a blank face or a tiny repeated figure with its back to the camera. They identify that figure as Walt. The absent brother is thus present through a visual signature that does not restore him or pretend to show him fully. Duncan’s work holds family memory and loss together, allowing the missing figure to recur without being filled in.

Later Life and Narrative Significance

Duncan survives both the accident that costs him an eye and a later accident that costs him an arm. After four months of hospitalization in Vermont, he returns to his New York studio-apartment and finds a lonely transsexual woman living there. She has arranged the apartment to look as though a real artist already lives in it and seems to know him through his pictures; she is in love with him from those images. Roberta Muldoon has helped bring the two together. Duncan and the woman marry, reflecting his lack of discrimination toward transsexual people.

He does not want children. He tells his mother that they are too vulnerable and that he could not stand watching them grow up; the sharper meaning is that he could not bear watching them fail to grow up. The statement links his refusal to a fear shaped by loss, without turning it into a generalized rejection of family. Duncan remains within family life, but cannot imagine taking on the particular exposure of raising children.

His relationship with his father also includes an artistic inheritance that is visible beyond the paintings. When Garp reads The Pension Grillparzer to an audience at Dog’s Head Harbor, Duncan attends; it is his favorite among his father’s works and one of the few he has been allowed to read. Afterward he shows Garp more than fifty drawings of its characters and situations. Garp recognizes the old bear and its unicycle, the grandmother’s exposed matchstick ankles, the dream man’s excited eyes, and other sharply observed figures. The drawings move him deeply, revealing Duncan as an artist in his own right and as a reader capable of translating his father’s story into a separate visual world.

Duncan’s mature art therefore carries two linked inheritances: Garp’s forceful personal vision and Duncan’s own altered way of seeing. Its family portraits record the people around him, while the recurring figure of Walt marks the limit of what such recording can recover. The work does not resolve injury into triumph or loss into consolation. Instead, it makes looking itself a practice of attention: to color, to bodies changed by accident, to a loved one who is gone, and to the images through which a family continues to remember.