A Prayer for Owen Meany (Criticism)

Criticism

Bryan Aubrey

Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century literature. In this essay, he discusses Owen Meany as a Christ-figure and shows how Irving connects this to a larger network of symbolism to buttress his critique of American politics and society.

Hunting for Christ-figures in literature is a popular pastime amongst students searching for a thesis to carry them through a term paper assignment. Although Western literature can yield many examples of such figures (Melville's Billy Budd is perhaps the best example), identifying Christ-figures in modern literature is often a more problematic enterprise. Many have been proposed, ranging from Frodo or Gandalf in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954 – 1956) to R. P. McMurphy in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), although none of these examples is highly convincing. But such is not the case with Owen Meany in A Prayer for Owen Meany. Owen is clearly and unambiguously a Christ-figure on many levels, from the obvious to the subtle. Irving uses the more esoteric aspects of the Christ symbol to add depth to his portrayal of the significance of Owen's life, as well as to buttress his critique of American politics and society.

It is obvious from the beginning of the novel that Owen Meany is special. John, the narrator, comments that he used to think Owen's strange falsetto voice came from another planet; now he believes that "it was a voice not entirely of this world." When, as a child, John sees Owen framed by a shaft of sunlight in the attic as they are playing, his appearance is so striking that "he looked like a descending angel — a tiny but fiery god, sent to adjudicate the errors of our ways."

From then on, Irving gives broad hints that Owen is neither alien nor angel but a Christ-figure. There is nothing ambiguous or ironic about the religious allusions. Irving wields his symbolism like a heavy blunt instrument; he wants to make sure readers get the point. For example, in chapter 4, when Owen, Dan, and John return home after Owen has secured the part of the Christ child in the Christmas pageant, the chapter ends with a quotation from the well-known Christmas carol:

As Owen finished knocking the snow off his boots — as the little Lord Jesus stepped inside our house — Dan half-sang, half-mumbled the refrain we knew so well: 'Hark! the herald an-gels sing, 'Glo-ry to the new-born King!'

Readers are meant to make the connection and not to doubt or question it. Irving wants readers to believe that Owen is following in Christ's footsteps in a way that is more than human. When Owen plays the Christ child with great authority — even his parents obey him — Mr. Fish says it is clear that Owen's Christ is no ordinary baby: "You know, he's the Lord! Jesus — from Day One."

There are clear thematic parallels between the life of Owen and the life of Christ. Like Christ, Owen must sacrifice his own life to save others. Like Christ, he is aware of his fate in advance. (In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples that he will be killed.) And just as Christ rises from the dead and appears to his disciples, so Owen "appears" to his friend John twice after his death. The first occasion is when John learns that the Reverend Merrill is his father and Merrill speaks in Owen's voice; the second time is when John believes that Owen's hand literally reaches out and keeps him from falling down the cellar stairs at his home. At the same time, he hears Owen's voice telling him that nothing bad is going to happen to him.

There is also the fact that Owen believes his parents' story that he, like Christ, is the product of a virgin birth. Although Irving cannot quite bring himself to present this without skepticism — John vehemently expresses his disbelief in such a notion — Irving very deliberately puts this extreme parallel to Christ in the reader's mind.

Owen is Christ-like in other ways as well. Everyone likes to touch him, which recalls how in the Gospel of Luke the crowd presses upon Jesus, wanting to touch him because of his healing power (Luke 6:19). And just as Christ describes himself in John's Gospel as "the light of the world," Owen is also consistently associated with light. The quality of his skin is such that it absorbs and reflects light, "as with a pearl, so that he appeared translucent at times." As a child playing in the attic, "The powerful morning sun struck Owen's head from above, and from a little behind him, so the light itself seemed to be presenting him." Owen brings light to the cemetery on the night John's mother is buried, arranging his flashlight so that it illuminates her grave. Then, at his own funeral, sunlight plays upon the medal that is pinned to the flag that covers his coffin. Irving regards this moment as so significant that he draws attention to it no less than four times in six pages. And just in case the reader has missed all these allusions to light, Irving sums it up, as if he is anxious to explain the symbolism of his own novel. The moment comes near the end of the book, as John waits at the airport in Arizona for Owen's plane to arrive:

Although the sun had set, vivid streaks of vermilion-colored light traced the enormous sky, and through one of these streaks of light I saw Owen's plane descending — as if, wherever Owen Meany went, some kind of light always attended him.

Even the typographical technique of printing Owen's words in all capital letters suggests Christ; there are Bibles in existence that print the words of Jesus in this way.

In addition to these straightforward parallels between Owen and Christ, Irving mines the Christ symbolism for deeper, more mystical resonances. Owen is presented as a being who straddles two worlds and unites within himself opposite values. He is the bridge between the divine and the human realms, uniting matter and spirit. It is no coincidence that Owen learns to work with granite. Granite is a hard, dense, unyielding stone. It represents the opposite of spiritual transparency and lightness. Owen develops great skill in working in this dense medium, carving and engraving gravestones. This hints at a parallel with the actions of the Christian God, who reaches down into the human world of death and has the will and the power to refashion even the most opaque, recalcitrant aspects of the material world (including people like John, who eventually discovers religious faith). And yet Owen himself is physically light, the very opposite of the granite he works with. When Owen is very young, the children at school love to lift him up and pass him around over their heads. His physical lightness is a symbol for his spiritual status. Once more, Irving cannot resist pointing this out himself. Having near the end of the novel twice referred back to the childhood entertainment of passing Owen around, John reflects in the final paragraph that the reason Owen felt light — the children even regarded him as weightless — was simply that some other, spiritual force was holding him up:

We did not realize that there were forces beyond our play. Now I know they were the forces that contributed to our illusion of Owen's weightlessness; they were the forces we didn't have the faith to feel, they were the forces we failed to believe in — and they were also lifting up Owen Meany, taking him out of our hands.

Another way in which Owen Meany unites opposites is in that he is a curiously androgynous figure. As a child he is tiny, and even as an adult he is only five feet tall. He speaks in a falsetto voice, both as child and man. So although he is muscular and strong for his size, there is something very feminine about him, too. This represents yet another parallel with Christ. There is a long tradition on the fringes of mainstream Christianity that regards Christ as an androgynous figure, a savior who embodies both the male and female aspects of life. Depictions of an androgynous Christ can be found in medieval Christian art and in the writings of Protestant mystics such as the seventeenth-century German seer, Jacob Boehme.

The notion of an androgynous Christ points to a larger symbolic framework in A Prayer for Owen Meany. In this framework, American society is shown as being out of balance due to a preponderance of an aggressive, destructive male energy that rides roughshod over the feminine aspects of life. This is made clear in the analogy that Owen carefully draws when he hears about the death of Marilyn Monroe, the glamorous actress and icon of femininity in America in the 1950s and early 1960s. Owen believes that Monroe was the victim of powerful men who used her for their own ends, and he compares her to America itself: "SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY — NOT QUITE YOUNG ANYMORE, BUT NOT OLD EITHER; A LITTLE BREATHLESS, VERY BEAUTIFUL, MAYBE A LITTLE STUPID, LOOKING FOR SOMETHING — I THINK SHE WANTED TO BE GOOD."

Just as Marilyn Monroe was "used," so, in Owen's eyes, America is used by powerful men, including his former hero, President John F. Kennedy. These are men who say they love their country but in reality merely use it for their own selfish and immoral ends. In terms of the male-female analogy, this amounts to the rape of the country, in which the innocence of a people who crave a savior and want to do good is betrayed. As far as John, the narrator, is concerned, this deceitfulness manifests in America's aggressive war in Vietnam, and from there it is a direct line to the lies and political chicanery that he sees in American foreign policy in the 1980s.

Given his comments about the exploitation of the country by powerful men and his siding with the victim, it is not surprising that Owen Meany is symbolically linked to the armless totem of the Indian chief Watahantowet. (John makes the comparison explicit when as a child he sees Owen with his arms clasped behind his back.) Owen accepts the Indian belief in the sacredness of the land and repudiates the vanity of the white man who thinks that only humans have souls and spirits. As he does with Marilyn Monroe, Owen takes the side of the victim — in this case the Indians who were robbed of their lands by the ruthless trickery of the white man. And of course, eventually, Owen becomes a victim of a similar kind of male aggression. He meets his death at the hands of Dick Jarvits, an adolescent male who embodies the violence-prone, testosterone-driven, doped-up, male-dominant society that looms up in the book as the defining nature of America in the 1960s. The surly, threatening, weapons-loving Dick cannot wait to attain legal age so that he can commit government-approved mayhem in Vietnam. And Irving is not above making a crude double entendre when he names this young man "Dick," as if to force home the idea of a link between aggressive male sexuality and the destructive instincts that give rise to war. Stacked against all these forces of destruction, Owen Meany is destined to become, like his role model Christ, at once hero and victim. All Owen can do, like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, is submit to the will of God, however difficult the consequences may be, and hope that that is sufficient.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on A Prayer for Owen Meany, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

What Do I Read Next?

• Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1982, Bantam Classic edition with an introduction by Irving), which tells the story of the village boy Pip and his "great expectations," is one of the novels that inspired Irving to become a writer.
• The family saga The World according to Garp (1976) was Irving's first best-selling novel, achieving cult status as well as critical acclaim.
• Neil Sheehen's A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1989) is a harsh critique of the war as exemplified in the career of John Paul Vann, who was an American military adviser in Vietnam. Sheehen is a journalist who covered the Vietnam War, and this book won a Pulitzer Prize.
• In Miracles (reprint, 2001), C. S. Lewis argues in his accessible, conversational style that miracles really do happen, even in everyday life, and are an essential element in the life of Christian faith.
• In The Problem of Pain (reprint, 2001), C. S. Lewis tackles the question of why a loving God would allow people to experience pain and suffering. He concludes that suffering is necessary to perfect a person and make him or her ready for heaven.