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A Prayer for Owen Meany is the seventh novel by American writer John Irving. Published in 1989, it tells the story of John Wheelwright and his best friend Owen Meany growing up together in a small New Hampshire town during the 1950s and 1960s.
Irving's next novel was A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), another New England family epic about religion set in a New England boarding school and in Toronto, Ontario. The novel was influenced by The Tin Drum (1959) by Günter Grass, [16] and the plot contains further allusions to The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne and the works of ...
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Writing from his home in Toronto, Canada in 1987, John Wheelwright narrates the story of his childhood. Peppering his narrative with frequent diary entries in which he chronicles his outrage against the behavior of the Ronald Reagan administration in the late 1980s, Wheelright tells the story of his early life in Gravesend, New Hampshire, when his ...
Owen is a bizarre child. A tiny dwarf, he has weirdly luminous skin and an ethereally nasal voice (represented in the novel in all-capital letters). He has a tremendous crush on John's mother, who, in turn, is very fond of him; she even intervenes with Owen's parents to ensure that he will be able to attend the elite Gravesend Academy for high scho...
Over time, as more and more details of his death are revealed to him, Owen comes to believe that he is God's instrument on Earth, and that he is destined to die heroically. He even believes that God caused him to kill John's mother--he believes that he accidentally interrupted the Angel of Death when it came to take her, and as a result, he was for...
In 1968, Owen begins working as a casualty-assistance officer, escorting the bodies of dead soldiers back to their families. One day, he calls John and asks him to meet for a few days in Phoenix, Arizona, where Owen is on assignment. John flies to Phoenix, and he and Owen spend a few days relaxing; John meets the bereaved family Owen is then helpin...
From his house in Toronto, John remembers that also before the funeral, he paid a visit to the Meanys, where Mr. Meany reveals a shocking fact: he claims that Owen was a virgin birth, just like Jesus Christ. He tells John that he told Owen this when Owen was about eleven--about the same time that Owen accidentally killed John's mother. John conside...
- John Irving
- 1989
Jan 1, 1989 · A Prayer for Owen Meany. John Irving. 4.24. 325,054 ratings16,738 reviews. Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen doesn't believe in accidents; he believes he is God's instrument.
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The main theme of A Prayer for Owen Meany is religious faith—specifically, the relationship between faith and doubt in a world in which there is no obvious evidence for the existence of God.
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.
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A Prayer for Owen Meany. “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 was the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”. Owen Meany is a character in a ...
