A Prayer for Owen Meany (Style)

Style

Symbols

There is a recurring motif of armlessness and amputation. It is first mentioned early in the novel, in the figure of Watahantowet, the seventeenth-century Indian chief in John's hometown of Gravesend, whose totem was an armless man. John explains that, to some, the totem symbolized how Watahantowet felt powerless after the white settlers had taken his land. Sometimes the totem was shown with a tomahawk in its mouth, which some identified, according to John, as a sign of peace: the Indian literally would not take arms against his enemies.

Another armless symbol is the dressmaker's dummy. Since the dummy is used in the novel as a reminder of Tabitha — almost as her silent double — it perhaps also suggests powerlessness or helplessness. Tabitha is powerless to resist or alter her fate.

A third example of the symbol of armlessness is when Owen removes the statue of Mary Magdalene and places it in the great hall in the academy. He cuts off the statue's arms above the elbows. John comments on this, saying that "her gesture of beseeching the assembled audience would seem all the more an act of supplication — and all the more helpless."

A fourth example is the stuffed armadillo, but this carries a very different meaning than the other examples. Owen returns the armadillo to John with its front claws removed so it can no longer stand upright. Even at the age of eleven, Owen has a symbolic purpose in mind, although it is not until he and John are students at Gravesend Academy that he explains what he meant by his actions: "GOD HAS TAKEN YOUR MOTHER. MY HANDS WERE THE INSTRUMENT. GOD HAS TAKEN MY HANDS. I AM GOD'S INSTRUMENT." In other words, Owen does not believe that he has an individual will; he cannot act simply to please himself. He was used by God as the instrument of Tabitha's death — it was not his arms but God's arms that were swinging the bat that resulted in her death. Armlessness thus becomes a symbol of the submission of an individual person to the will of God. The symbol takes on a gruesome reality when Owen, meeting his destined death, obeying the will of God, literally has his arms blown off by the grenade that kills him.

Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing is a literary technique in which a future event is hinted at, often symbolically or obliquely, before it happens. An example is the symbol of armlessness explained above, which foreshadows the moment Owen literally loses his arms. Irving hints at this moment as early as chapter 2, when John sees Owen with his hands clasped behind his back and thinks he looks as armless as Watahantowet.

Another example of foreshadowing is when Tabitha is hit on the head by a hailstone at her wedding, which foreshadows the incident with the baseball that kills her. Just to make sure the reader gets the point, Irving has John squeeze a hailstone in his hand, and John finds that it is as "hard as a baseball." (Because of the nonlinear structure of the narrative, particularly in the early part of the book, this incident is placed after rather than before the description of the fatal accident.)

A third example is the way John and Owen practice their basketball slam-dunk shot. John's lifting of Owen and the need to accomplish the shot in three seconds both foreshadow the scene of Owen's death when the basketball move is repeated in a different context.

Owen's vision of the gravestone with his name on it and his dream of his own death are other examples of foreshadowing.

Suspense

A technique similar to foreshadowing is the storyteller's art of creating suspense. Irving accomplishes this often, simply by using the phrase "as you shall see" to hint at future plot twists. For example, at the end of chapter 3, John comments in his diary entry that he has in the past "been moved to do evil — as you shall see"; the reader is eager to discover what this evil might have been, which is only revealed near the end of the novel. (It is his deception of the Reverend Merrill with a bogus miracle.)

Another example of creating suspense is when Owen refers to the "UNSPEAKABLE OUTRAGE" that his father and mother suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church. This is mentioned in the first chapter and repeated several times during the course of the novel. What it refers to (Owen's supposed virgin birth) is not revealed until well into the last chapter. Similarly, at the end of chapter 2, John says it was Owen who kept him out of Vietnam with "a trick that only Owen could have managed." It is another 350 pages before the reader finds out what this trick was.

Point of View and Structure

The story is told by a first-person narrator, John Wheelwright. Although John is an important character and events are seen through his eyes, he usually plays a supporting role to Owen Meany. In most scenes, he is the more passive character. In the Christmas pageant, for example, John plays Joseph and has little to do but stand and watch. As observer and interpreter, John reflects on the events that have so deeply affected him, and he does this from a double perspective. The first standpoint is that of his own thoughts and experiences as a child growing up with Owen as his best friend. John does not always follow chronological order in his relating of these events. The early chapters in particular jump back and forth in time between different incidents in his childhood.

The second perspective, interspersed with the first, is that of John as a man in his forties, now living in Toronto in 1987. He looks back at a distance of over twenty years at those same events of his childhood and early manhood, and he also comments on contemporary events.

The advantage of this two-level structure is that it enables John to link his anger and distrust of American foreign policy in the 1980s with events in the 1960s, particularly the Vietnam War. It also gives the reader deeper insight into the key events in John's and Owen's lives and shows how those events shaped the man John has become.