Lit. Lesson #63: A Sign for the Faithless: John Wheelwright and the Tragedy at the Heart of A Prayer for Owen Meany

Sep 29, 2026 | 1 comment

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. 

~ Opening sentence of Prayer for Owen Meany

Spoiler: In this post we will discuss the whole book, including the ending.

The Book Everyone Loves, and the Man Nobody Watches

A Prayer for Owen Meany was published by William Morrow in March 1989, John Irving’s seventh novel. It follows John Wheelwright and his best friend Owen Meany growing up in a small New Hampshire town in the 1950s and 1960s. Owen is a tiny boy with a ruined voice, printed in capital letters throughout, who believes he is GOD’S INSTRUMENT. At eleven, he hits a foul ball that kills John’s mother. That same year, at a performance where he plays the ghost of Christmas future, he sees his own name and date of death on a gravestone, and spends his life moving toward that date, which arrives in Phoenix, Arizona and while he’s doing his job as a body escort for the US Army.

The story is told by John, a voluntary expatriate in Toronto in 1987 after Owen’s death. And the book runs on two clocks, the boyhood past and John’s furious, lonely present.

Questions we’ll take on in this teaching: Who is the “protagonist” and what is the plot, and why? Bonus Teaching Question: Why is the opening line of Owen Meany an attack sentence?

1989 Critics Raise Their Voices

Champions:In Time, R. Z. Sheppard praised the lively ensemble, the storytelling momentum, and prose he felt Irving rarely gets credit for. William Pritchard, in the New Republic, also gave a generally positive review, calling the comic set pieces the best thing in the book and comparing Irving to Twain, Tarkington and Salinger.

Detractors: Peter Prescott, in Newsweek, was blunt: “run while you can.” Alfred Kazin, in the New York Times Book Review, called John a “conscious and unapologetic wimp.” Kirkus found the tone too self-righteous to be fully convincing as fiction, though it praised the prep-school sendups.

Look at what even the fans said about John. Pritchard found the narrator’s present life in Canada uninteresting. Robert Towers, in the New York Review of Books, said John doesn’t fully come to life and doesn’t inspire total confidence. These critics read Owen as the hero and John as the witness, then marked John down for being flat. TAKE NOTE: If John is the protagonist, that “flatness” is the subject of the book.

But overall, this particular book is a success story over the long haul (something we all want to watch since the goal here at Blackbird is creating work that “stands the test of time”) and Owen Meany has done so. It made the New York Times bestseller list, became Irving’s best-selling novel since Garp and his publisher now calls it his all-time bestselling novel in every language. It’s also become a staple of high school reading lists and readers (then and now) have treated it with something close to devotion.

The Author Behind the Book

Unlike other more elusive writers of his time, Pynchon, DeLillo, McCarthy, at least elusive in the way of being interviewed often and sharing personal details about their lives, Irving has been interviewed often and is very much an “open book” about his life. Piece together these interviews and it’s very easy for us to see that Owen Meany is his most autobiographical novel.

The missing father factor: Irving never knew his biological father and was adopted by his stepfather at six. Sound familiar?

The school: Gravesend Academy is modeled on Phillips Exeter, where Irving’s stepfather taught. Irving’s own time there was hard. His teachers regarded him as lazy and stupid because of undiagnosed dyslexia, and he only saw how badly he’d been treated when his own son was diagnosed.

The country: Irving avoided the draft because he was a married father when he came of age, and this was the first novel in which he examined the consequences of Vietnam. He has said he wanted to create two victims of the period, one a hero and the other a defector. Owen is the hero, and John, who leaves for Canada, is the defector which may be how Irving felt about his avoiding it while so many others volunteered or were called up.

The matter of faith: Irving isn’t religious and says that this novel began with a “what if” question turned into a “what would” question. What would it take to make a believer out of a non-religious person, out of him? Rather than following the what-if process to the end, he stopped short at his own lack thereof and said: It would take a lot. And that is John’s central point throughout his narrative: Belief.

It could be argued then that this entire book is about the wrestling process within Irving, but also within all of us. And the collective wrestling in a country founded on the Christian faith that also allows, via the Constitution, the freedom to practice all forms of religion, from voodoo to satanic worship. It’s all protected, and so it speech. This means that yes, there’s a lot for this country to wrestle with.

Irving’s Muddiness: Faith by Proof

Owen models what faith looks like, and when John can’t make sense of it, he tells him plainly, “YOU DON’T HAVE ANY FAITH.” He also illustrates it. During an evening practice session of “the shot,” Owen continually asks John whether the statue of Mary Magdalene is still there as it gets too dark to see it. John says yes and Owen questions again and yet again. “Are you sure?” And then gets frustrated, yelling YES.. Owen’s line then explains this as what it means to believe, or have faith, and that the real miracles aren’t anything you can see. They’re things you have to believe without seeing.

But Owen also says, “EVERYONE NEEDS A LITTLE PROOF,” and the whole of Owen’s story, to his death, supplies it with how his death unfolds exactly as he foresaw, and John becomes a believer having been there to witness that unfolding. And this proof continues, as if Owen knows he must continue giving John little nudges. He twice visits John as a ghost and reminds the man of little faith that he’s still there.

Faith then becomes a matter of two positions: Private versus public. Owen’s signs are inward and visible to no one else. Through his conversations in his journal and through prayer and in private meetings with Pastor Merrill. John’s are external and his belief by sign: “I am a Christian because of Owen Meany,” which is the evidence-driven faith of a man who is all head.

The critics felt this without naming it. Kazin (NYT Book Critic) thought Owen’s foretelling was closer to astrology than faith, and Towers (New York Review of Books) found the Christian elements hard to credit.

And all this brings me to my argument, which I’ve found no where as of this writing: The protagonist of this book is John.

What I have found, again and again, is three things:

  1. The book is overwhelmingly classified as a Bildungsroman and that is it’s standard shelf label.
  2. At Internet Public Library, at ipl.org, I found one student essay that  argues the novel “can be classified as a tragedy” using Aristotle’s Poetics, but its tragic hero is Owen, not John. And this writer plots the whole arc through Owen’s dream, his death, and his posthumous Soldier’s Medal as the completed cause-and-effect chain, with John undergoing the catharsis, not the tragic fall. But not, this is a student paper, not a data point or authority. Elsewhere, “tragedy” and “tragic” get used loosely and non-technically, as in “tragedy of Vietnam” or Goodreads calling Owen “the principal, tragic actor,” which is describing pathos, not naming Booker’s plot-type.
  3. Owen is overwhelmingly assumed to be the hero. Look it up for yourself. I did, and found that nearly every study guide, GradeSaver, Shmoop, and LitCharts, treats him as the central figure whose foreknowledge and sacrifice drive the plot, and John is the narrator/witness. I found exactly one source that explicitly floats John as co-protagonist: a blog post comparing the novel to Great Expectations, which says “it could be argued that there are two protagonists…Owen Meany himself as well as John Wheelwright.” But that’s a personal blog, not criticism, but it’s the only place I found anyone even entertain John as a protagonist alongside Owen.

But we have a pretty good tool with Booker, one that helps us track story over the history of story, and Owen isn’t a true hero in the classic sense. Why? He never changes throughout the course of the book. He’s the same at the beginning as at the end. Lovable, smart, endlessly charming and destined. There is no arc. He lives, he has a vision and he dies. Willingly.

Again, that’s not heroic. That’s what I’d call “predictable” and even trope. Owen says something similar: He was used. That was Owen’s purpose then, and he knew it, that is to be an instrument of God’s will.

Leaning into Christopher Booker’s central thesis about the “hero” or protagonist, it is the one figure the story constellates around and that includes all the other characters either bringing light or reflecting darkness to that “ONE.”  Owen brings the faith, the surrender and the light that John cannot.

Let’s take a closer look:

To help us suss this out, remember that Owen’s story is told, not lived. John is the one who lives on, telling the story of Owen from his exile in Canada. It’s retrospect from a man without a country. A man without a friend. A man so smart, and full of himself, and convinced that he’s right that even his polite Canadian hosts offer correction. But can he hear a word? No. He’s the man who will not move an inch and channels his inertia into an obsession with events he has no control over but only stands outside, in outrage, and judges them. He’s the armchair quarterback. He’s the protestor demanding fairness though what exactly isn’t fair is never quite clear. He’s the one who leaves a country, and a home, and never shuts up about his reasons why meaning he just wanted distance in order he can stay exactly the same. John is Scrooge without the up twist of awakening that a writer like Dickens could produce.

  1. Anticipation. The flaw isn’t an appetite. It’s avoidance. John wants to be carried. Owen helps him through school, directs him toward a career as an English teacher, and amputates his finger to keep him out of the war.
  2. Dream. He gets away with it. He avoids the draft and Owen takes the hit. Nothing is required of him.
  3. Frustration. After Owen’s death, things go wrong and John commits a dark act. Disappointed to learn that Merrill is his father, he dresses his mother’s dressmaker’s dummy in her red dress and places it outside Merrill’s church office to teach him a lesson, and Merrill takes it for Tabitha’s ghost. It works: Merrill recovers his faith and preaches at Owen’s funeral with renewed confidence. Meant as a punishment, it gives his father back his faith. John breaks his bonds and lives a double life as a Canadian citizen who is completely American. Dan counsels him to let bygones be bygones and points out that Owen wouldn’t have blamed a whole country for what happened to him. John answers that not even the pull of the house on Front Street would bring him back. It’s the moment a tragic hero could change course, and he deflects.
  4. Nightmare. Owen’s death, and the survivor’s guilt he never names. Canon Mackie notes that John talks about America more than any American he knows, and the rage at Reagan is where the grief goes.
  5. Destruction. John isn’t destroyed physically. He’s hollowed out: celibate, “neutered” by his own account, and cast adrift. Booker says the light “constellates more and more outside” the hero, first in the innocent victims. That’s Owen. The community is redeemed, Merrill’s faith restored and the children are saved, and John isn’t.

So this is a tragedy of omission. Booker’s tragic heroes usually grab something. John’s grab: He refuses to act, to grieve, or to come home.

Value Line: Faith

Faith/Positive > Doubt/Contrary > Unbelief/Contradictory > Counterfeit Faith/Negation of the Negation

John doesn’t move up this line. He manufactures counterfeit faith in Merrill, and his own belief, however sincere, rests on a sign. It’s the bottom of the line, and he never leaves it. The book ends with the man who was given everything, holding on to someone else’s life.

🧐 PONDER:

  1. Who did you believe the hero was in Prayer for Owen Meany? And does this move you closer or further from understanding?
  2. Who carries the light for your protagonist in your story? CLUE: Look at the sidekick, the beloved, the mother. Are they doing their job or can you work these characters a bit more?
  3. How is the opening sentence of this book an attack sentence? Need to look that up and read about it again? Click here and go to PG. 3

Bring your answer to one, or all to class, and see you there. JL 🐦‍⬛

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1 Comment

  1. Jennifer Lauck
    Jennifer Lauck on October 8, 2026 at 6:09 pm

    A writer brought up the possibility that John is the protag but that this might be Voyage & Return. I love when a writer offers another option and it gives me yet another chance to dig into this amazing teaching that never fails to enlighten my own creative writing mind. Let’s see:

    Booker’s stage 5 allows for an “unaffected” outcome meaning John doesn’t have to transform. John can be Scarlett in this case: thrown into chaos, survives it, and emerges the same person he went in as.

    The structure can even be argued well:

    Anticipation and fall: a young John, naive and “directionless,” is pulled from ordinary Gravesend life by his mother’s death and Owen’s strangeness.
    Fascination: the pageant years, the school years, Owen as this exhilarating, destabilizing presence.
    Frustration and Nightmare: Vietnam, the finger, Owen’s foretold death closing in.
    Escape: John leaves for Canada.
    But, as I see it comes stage 5 “Thrilling Escape and Return,” which is the whole point of the plot type: the hero gets out of the abnormal world and back to “the safety of the family world where they began.” And that doesn’t happen: Dan repeatedly asks John to come home, and John says plainly that not even “the tempting nostalgia of the house at 80 Front Street” could bring him back. He never returns. He’s still in Toronto in 1987, twenty years later, narrating from exile.

    If it were voyage and return it could one of two outcomes possibilities….

    Arguing that Canada itself becomes John’s new “family world,” but the story won’t support, since multiple sources note he never assimilates and remains obsessively American, estranged from both countries at once, or
    Treating the narration itself as the “return,” the act of telling the story as a kind of homecoming in memory and that could be where you are going. Which is legit and sophisticated. But even there, I believe Booker’s return is supposed to restore the hero to safety and family. John’s narration isn’t that. It’s compulsive, embittered, diary-entries-at-3am material, Reagan rage layered over grief he can’t metabolize. That’s not a man safely home telling a settled story. That’s what, with more thought, I would call it… a man still in the abnormal world, just narrating from inside it.
    Voyage and Return assumes the “family world” is still there and safe to return to, and that the hero’s journey is a closed loop. Tragedy says the opposite: John is offered the return, explicitly, by name, in a scene, and refuses it. That refusal is the single biggest structural fact.

    Reply

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