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A Prayer for Owen Meany | Introduction

John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, published by Ballantine in 1989, is a long, sprawling novel in the tradition of Charles Dickens and other nineteenth-century novelists. John Wheelwright, a former American who is now a Canadian citizen living in Toronto, tells the story. John recalls growing up in a small town in New Hampshire with a very unusual best friend, a tiny boy with a high voice named Owen Meany. Despite his strange appearance and voice, Owen is a boy with a strong personality, intellectual gifts, and an air of authority that enables him to take charge of a situation. Owen also possesses a strong religious faith and an uncanny knowledge of future events in his life—including the exact time and circumstances of his own tragic but heroic death. It is through Owen Meany that John becomes a religious believer.

A Prayer for Owen Meany is Irving's seventh novel. Compellingly readable, it contains a large cast of idiosyncratic small-town characters and has many hilarious scenes and episodes. It also contains serious political and religious themes, exploring issues such as faith and doubt, predestination, the Vietnam War, and the wider issue of American foreign policy from the 1960s to the 1980s. The book is also a mine of information about American social history, from the advent of television in the 1950s to the rock videos of the 1980s.

A Prayer for Owen Meany Summary

Chapter 1: The Foul Ball
A Prayer for Owen Meany begins with the narrator, John Wheelwright, commenting that he believes in God because of his boyhood friend Owen Meany. John flashes back nearly forty years and recalls Owen. Not only was Owen tiny, but his vocal cords did not develop properly, giving him a high, strange-sounding, nasal voice. Then John explains his family background. He is from Gravesend, New Hampshire, and he can trace his family back to the Mayflower. However, John does not know who his father is, his birth being the result of an encounter between his mother, Tabitha, and a man she met on the Boston & Maine Railroad. John's mother is killed when he is eleven. Owen hits a foul ball, which strikes John's mother on the head, while he's playing Little League baseball. Chapter 2: The Armadillo
The narrative jumps back and forth to different events and times in John's childhood. John recalls when his mother met her future husband, Dan Needham, a drama teacher. Dan gives John a stuffed armadillo. John recalls staying at Sawyer Depot during summer vacations with his boisterous older cousins Noah, Simon, and Hester. Owen meets the cousins at Thanksgiving at John's home. They are startled by his strange appearance, but they accede to his wishes about what games to play. After the fatal accident, as a way of apologizing to John, Owen gives him his precious collection of baseball cards. Dan and John realize that Owen also wants the cards back, so they return them. In exchange, John gives Owen his armadillo. Owen returns it but with the front claws removed. The chapter returns to the present, with an extract from John's diary entry for January 30, 1987. John now lives in Toronto, and he is angry about the policies of President Ronald Reagan. The moving back and forth between past and present happens in almost all the chapters.

Chapter 3: The Angel
John describes two important motifs in the novel, the dressmaker's dummy that his mother always kept in her bedroom and the red dress that she bought in one of her trips to Boston for singing lessons. Then he describes a night when Owen has a fever and goes to John's mother's bedroom, where he thinks he sees an angel. After Tabitha's death, Owen believes this was the angel of death, and because he had interrupted it, the angel reassigned its task to him. John then returns to describing the four-year courtship between Dan and his mother and their wedding in 1952. Then he describes the funeral service at some length. That evening, John discovers Owen at the... » Complete A Prayer for Owen Meany Summary