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A Prayer for Owen Meany

Published on Feb 04, 2016

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PRESENTATION OUTLINE

A Prayer for Owen Meany

Photo by Josh Kenzer

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice--not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”

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Photo by JD Hancock

Who is Owen Meany?
What's his purpose?

A Prayer for Owen Meany is about a very small peculiar boy Owen Meany, his friend, and narrator, John Wheelwright, and the people from there small New Hampshire town Gravesend. The book follows them from childhood when Owen kills John's mother Tabitha with a baseball until there early adulthood.
Photo by rishibando

Connections

to HTRLLAP
Brianna: A Prayer for Owen Meany is not only impressive on the surface. John Irving utilizes many of the literary techniques seen in How To Read Literature Like a Professor to make his novel truly excellent.

Symbolism

  • Armlessness
  • "The Lady in Red"
  • The Baseball
  • Owen Meany
Armlessness is a theme that gains different meanings throughout the book. Helplessness, sacrifice, loss. Imagine if someone had taken your arms. The sense of loss and helplessness you feel. Now imagine if God had taken your arms. Imagine that sacrifice you must have made and a different sense of helplessness.
"The Lady in Red" symbolic of both sin and freedom. The freedom. Freedom for Tabitha to sing, get away from a judgmental society. Yet displays her sin, her discontent in wearing it shows her own oral disappointment, for wearing the dress is her addressing her sin.
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Never Stand Next to the Hero

  • Sacrifice for the plot
  • Heroes are too important to lose
  • Affects many of their loved ones, positively or negatively

Intertextuality

  • The Bible
Ashley: The Bible
-Christ Figure

Owen as Jesus, shows sacrifice(his destiny and saving the children), resurrection (After they let him drown. "YOU WATCHED ME DROWN! I'M ALREADY DEAD.", Crucifixion (being expelled from school)
-Lost in Durham(Jerusalem)
-Tabby(New Testament)

-The Scarlet Letter
Red Dress->Scarlet Letter
Hester the Molester-> Hester
Pastor Merrill->Rev. Dimmesdale





"SO WHAT?"

Themes and Messages
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Fate and Destiny

Owen = hero following his fate.

Novel addresses idea of fate as something we can or cannot control.

Owen accepts/works toward fate.

This forces us as readers to consider our own place in the world not only today but also tomorrow.
Photo by NawafArt

Faith and Doubt

can coexist
Brianna: Another major theme in A Prayer for Owen Meany is the relationship between faith and doubt. The narrator, John Wheelwright, is constantly grappling with faith and doubt, while his best friend, Owen Meany, embodies faith. Owen has no doubt whatsoever about God’s role in his life, and is constantly showing this.

People with absolute faith intimidate John because John himself has so much doubt. Rev. Lewis Merrill is another character who is full of doubt, and he argues that “doubt is the essence of faith”. However, Owen thinks that Rev. Merrill has too much doubt.

The message in the novel is that faith and doubt can coexist. As mentioned in the book, faith, by definition, is believing in something without evidence that it exists. Therefore, there must be uncertainty in faith, otherwise it is not faith at all.
Photo by Josh Kenzer

What we thought

personal responses