Garfield named first true American epic

By Gannon Hubbard
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The Library of Congress has come to the end of its exhaustive search for America’s own National Epic, naming Jim Davis’s comic strip Garfield as the hallowed tome. “Like the Iliad, Garfield has a certain quality to it that I think will propel it into a class of literature that few works ever enter,” said the National Epic Selection Committee’s Chairwoman, Samantha Mulroney. “Jim Davis is truly the Homer for our times.”

As described in the Committee’s announcement, Garfield is ripe with the tropes of the Homeric epic. Garfield is the hero beset by perils and lethargy, his only purpose a God-given quest to eat himself to death. Jon Arbuckle is the Chorus, acting not so much as an individual character but as a narrator to help the audience follow the cat’s complex adventures. For example, “Garfield, you are eating too much lasagna,” or “Garfield, you are fat.”

“When examined carefully, one sees that there are five main conflicts in The Garfield (as it is now known in learnèd circles),” says UNC’s Garfieldic scholar, James Tryon. “These are Garfield versus Society, Nature, Man, Alarm Clocks, and Lasagna. Any English undergrad could tell you that these are the same five conflicts which form the basis of every extant work of fiction, the only exceptions being U. S. Acres (Garfield versus a talking egg in its shell) and The DaVinci Code (Garfield versus Dan Brown). The only conclusion is that Garfield is the ur-fiction, the prototype on which all worthwhile literature is based.”

Though Davis’s is the name most commonly associated with the lovable furball nowadays, who knows what the original scribe may have been named who traveled the country spreading the tale so many years ago, or how many suction cup plushies he may have had in the window of his ’56 Woody station wagon? It is a mystery lost to the ages, but every schoolchild who recites the adventures of Garfield and Friends in his or her kindergarten class may thank that original poet for this essential piece of their culture.