Expert answer:A Prayer for Owen Meany, reading journal help
Answer & Explanation:You will write a journal entry detailing your thoughts, impressions, and difficulties while reading the Above, you are expected to write down your thoughts as you read . Reading journals will be graded on a 10-point scale, for thoughtfulness and depth. all formal assignments should be typed using MLA citation style, Times New Roman font, 12pt font, and double-spaced. Text We are using is: A Prayer for Owen
MeanyReading Journal #1: A Prayer for Owen
Meany 1-2A copy from the book you can find Here:DOC Thank you
a_prayer_for_owen_meany___john_irving.pdf
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A Prayer
for
Owen Meany
John Irving
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE FOUL BALL
THE ARMADILLO
THE ANGEL
LITTLE LORD JESUS
THE GHOST OF THE FUTURE
THE VOICE
THE DREAM
THE FINGER
THE SHOT
THE FOUL BALL
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. I make no claims
to have a life in Christ, or with Christ-and certainly not for Christ, which I’ve heard some zealots
claim. I’m not very sophisticated in my knowledge of the Old Testament, and I’ve not read the New
Testament since my Sunday school days, except for those passages that I hear read aloud to me when I
go to church. I’m somewhat more familiar with the passages from the Bible that appear in The Book
of Common Prayer; I read my prayer book often, and my Bible only on holy days-the prayer book is
so much more orderly.
I’ve always been a pretty regular churchgoer. I used to be a Congregationalist-I was baptized in the
Congregational Church, and after some years of fraternity with Episcopalians (I was confirmed in the
Episcopal Church, too), I became rather vague in my religion: in my teens I attended a “nondenominational” church. Then I became an Anglican; the Anglican Church of Canada has been my
church-ever since I left the United States, about twenty years ago. Being an Anglican is a lot like
being an Episcopalian-so much so that being an Anglican occasionally impresses upon me the
suspicion that I have simply become an Episcopalian again. Anyway, I left the Congregationalists and
the Episcopalians-and my country once and for all. When I die, I shall attempt to be buried in New
Hampshire- alongside my mother-but the Anglican Church will perform the necessary service before
my body suffers the indignity of trying to be sneaked through U.S. Customs. My selections from the
Order for the Burial of the Dead ate entirely conventional and can be found, in the order that I shall
have them read-not sung-in The Book of Common Prayer. Almost everyone I know will be familiar
with the passages from John, beginning with”. . . whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never
die.” And then there’s “… in my Father’s house are many mansions: If it were not so, I would have told
you.” And I have always appreciated the frankness expressed in that passage from Timothy, the one
that goes “. . .we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.” It will be
a by-the-book Anglican service, the kind that would make my former fellow Congregationalists fidget
in their pews. I am an Anglican now, and I shall die an Anglican. But I skip a Sunday service now and
then; I make no claims to be especially pious; I have a church-rummage faith-the kind that needs
patching up every weekend. What faith I have I owe to Owen Meany, a boy I grew up with. It is Owen
who made me a believer. In Sunday school, we developed a form of entertainment based on abusing
Owen Meany, who was so small that not only did his feet not touch the floor when he sat in his chairhis knees did not extend to the edge of his seat; therefore, his legs stuck out straight, like the legs of a
doll. It was as if Owen Meany had been born without realistic joints. Owen was so tiny, we loved to
pick him up; in truth, we couldn’t resist picking him up. We thought it was a miracle: how little he
weighed. This was also incongruous because Owen came from a family in the granite business. The
Meany Granite Quarry was a big place, the equipment for blasting and cutting the granite slabs was
heavy and dangerous-looking; granite itself is such a rough, substantial rock. But the only aura of the
granite quarry that clung to Owen was the granular dust, the gray powder that sprang off his clothes
whenever we lifted him up. He was the color of a gravestone; light was both absorbed and reflected
by his skin, as with a pearl, so that he appeared translucent at times-especially at his temples, where
his blue veins showed through his skin (as though, in addition to his extraordinary size, there were
other evidence that he was born too soon). His vocal cords had not developed fully, or else his voice
had been injured by the rock dust of his family’s business. Maybe he had larynx damage, or a
destroyed trachea; maybe he’d been hit in the throat by a chunk of granite. To be heard at all, Owen
had to shout through his nose. Yet he was dear to us-“a little doll,” the girls called him, while he
squirmed to get away from them; and from all of us. I don’t remember how our game of lifting Owen
began. This was Christ Church, the Episcopal Church of Graves-end, New Hampshire. Our Sunday
school teacher was a strained, unhappy-looking woman named Mrs. Walker. We thought this name
suited her because her method of teaching involved a lot of walking out of class. Mrs. Walker would
read us an instructive passage from the Bible. She would then ask us to think seriously about what we
had heard-“Silently and seriously, that’s how I want you to think!” she would say. “I’m going to leave
you alone with your thoughts, now,” she would tell us ominously-as if our thoughts were capable of
driving us over the edge. “I want you to think very hard,” Mrs. Walker would say. Then she’d walk
out on us. I think she was a smoker, and she couldn’t allow herself to smoke in frontofus. “When I
come back,” she’d say, “we’ll talk about it.”
By the time she came back, of course, we’d forgotten everything about whatever it was-because as
soon as she left the room, we would fool around with a frenzy. Because being alone with our thoughts
was no fun, we would pick up Owen Meany and pass him back and forth, overhead. We managed this
while remaining seated in our chairs-that was the challenge of the game. Someone-I forget who
started it-would get up, seize Owen, sit back down with him, pass him to the next person, who would
pass him on, and so forth. The girls were included in this game; some of the girls were the most
enthusiastic about it. Everyone could lift up Owen. We were very careful; we never dropped him. His
shirt might become a little rumpled. His necktie was so long, Owen tucked it into his trousers-or else
it would have hung to his knees-and his necktie often came untucked; sometimes his change would fall
out (in our faces). We always gave him his money back. If he had his baseball cards with him, they,
too, would fall out of his pockets. This made him cross because the cards were alphabetized, or
ordered under another system-all the infield-ers together, maybe. We didn’t know what the system
was, but obviously Owen had a system, because when Mrs. Walker came back to the room-when
Owen returned to his chair and we passed his nickels and dimes and his baseball cards back to himhe would sit shuffling through the cards with a grim, silent fury. He was not a good baseball player,
but he did have a very small strike zone and as a consequence he was often used as a pinch hitter-not
because he ever hit the ball with any authority (in fact, he was instructed never to swing at the ball),
but because he could be relied upon to earn a walk, a base on balls. In Little League games he
resented this exploitation and once refused to come to bat unless he was allowed to swing at the
pitches. But there was no bat small enough for him to swing that didn’t hurl his tiny body after it-that
didn’t thump him on the back and knock him out of the batter’s box and flat upon the ground. So, after
the humiliation of swinging at a few pitches, and missing them, and whacking himself off his feet,
Owen Meany selected that other humiliation of standing motionless and crouched at home plate while
the pitcher aimed the ball at Owen’s strike zone-and missed it, almost every time. Yet Owen loved his
baseball cards-and, for some reason, he clearly loved the game of baseball itself, although the game
was cruel to him. Opposing pitchers would threaten him. They’d tell him that if he didn’t swing at their
pitches, they’d hit him with the ball. “Your head’s bigger than your strike zone, pal,” one pitcher told
him. So Owen Meany made his way to first base after being struck by pitches, too. Once on base, he
was a star. No one could run the bases like Owen. If our team could stay at bat long enough, Owen
Meany could steal home. He was used as a pinch runner in the late innings, too; pinch runner and
pinch hitter Meany-pinch walker Meany, we called him. In the field, he was hopeless. He was afraid
of the ball; he shut his eyes when it came anywhere near Mm. And if by some miracle he managed to
catch it, he couldn’t throw it; his hand was too small to get a good grip. But he was no ordinary
complainer; if he was self-pitying, his voice was so original in its expression of complaint that he
managed to make whining lovable. In Sunday school, when we held Owen up in the air-especially, in
the air!-he protested so uniquely. We tortured him, I think, in order to hear his voice; I used to think
his voice came from another planet. Now I’m convinced it was a voice not entirely of this world.
“PUT ME DOWN!” he would say in a strangled, emphatic falsetto. “CUT IT OUT! I DON’T WAN
TO DO THIS ANYMORE. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. PUT ME DOWN! YOU ASSHOLES!”
But we just passed him around and around. He grew more fatalistic about it, each time. His body was
rigid; he wouldn’t struggle. Once we had him in the air, he folded his arms defiantly on his chest; he
scowled at the ceiling. Sometimes Owen grabbed hold of his chair the instant Mrs. Walker left the
room; he’d cling like a bird to a swing in its cage, but he was easy to dislodge because he was
ticklish. A girl named Sukey Swift was especially deft at tickling Owen; instantly, his arms and legs
would stick straight out and we’d have him up in the air again.
“NO TICKLING!” he’d say, but the rules to this game were our rules. We never listened to Owen.
Inevitably, Mrs. Walker would return to the room when Owen was in the air. Given the biblical
nature of her instructions to us: “to think very hard …” she might have imagined that by a supreme act
of our combined and hardest thoughts we had succeeded in levitating Owen Meany. She might have
had the wit to suspect that Owen was reaching toward heaven as a direct result of leaving us alone
with our thoughts. But Mrs. Walker’s response was always the same-brutish and unimaginative and
incredibly dense. “Owen!” she would snap. ‘ ‘Owen Meany, you get back to your seat! You get down
from up there!”
What could Mrs. Walker teach us about the Bible if she was stupid enough to think that Owen Meany
had put himself up in the air? Owen was always dignified about it. He never said, “THEY DID IT!
THEY ALWAYS DO IT! THEY PICK ME UP AND LOSE MY MONEY AND MESS UP M
BASEBALL CARDS-AND THEY NEVER PUT ME DOWN WHEN I ASK THEM TO! WHAT
YOU THINK, THAT I FLEW WHERE?”
But although Owen would complain to us, he would never complain about us. If he was occasionally
capable of being a stoic in the air, he was always a stoic when Mrs. Walker accused him of childish
behavior. He would never accuse us. Owen was no rat. As vividly as any number of the stories in the
Bible, Owen Meany showed us what a martyr was. It appeared there were no hard feelings. Although
we saved our most ritualized attacks on him for Sunday school, we also lifted him up at other timesmore spontaneously. Once someone hooked him by bis collar to a coat tree in the elementary school
auditorium; even then, even there, Owen didn’t struggle. He dangled silently, and waited for someone
to unhook him and put him down. And after gym class, someone hung him in his locker and shut the
door. “NOT FUNNY! NOT FUNNY!” he called, and called, until someone must have agreed with
him and freed him from the company of his jockstrap-the size of a slingshot. How could I have known
that Owen was a hero? Let me say at the outset that I was a Wheelwright-that was the family name that
counted in our town: the Wheelwrights. And Wheelwrights were not inclined toward sympathy to
Meanys. We were a matriarchal family because my grandfather died when he was a young man and
left my grandmother to carry on, which she managed rather grandly. I am descended from John Adams
on my grandmother’s side (her maiden name was Bates, and her family came to America on the
Mayflower); yet, in our town, it was my grandfather’s name that had the clout, and my grandmother
wielded her married name with such a sure sense of self-possession that she might as well have been
a Wheelwright and an Adams and a Bates. Her Christian name was Harriet, but she was Mrs.
Wheelwright to almost everyone-certainly to everyone in Owen Meany’s family. I think that
Grandmother’s final vision of anyone named Meany would have been George Meany-the labor man,
the cigar smoker. The combination of unions and cigars did not sit well with Harriet Wheelwright.
(To my knowledge, George Meany is not related to the Meany family from my town.) I grew up in
Gravesend, New Hampshire; we didn’t have any unions there-a few cigar smokers, but no union men.
The town where I was born was purchased from an Indian sagamore in by the Rev. John
Wheelwright, after whom I was named. In New England, the Indian chiefs and higher-ups were called
sagamores; although, by the time I was a boy, die only sagamore I knew was a neighbor’s dog-a male
Labrador retriever named Sagamore (not, I think, for his Indian ancestry but because of his owner’s
ignorance). Sagamore’s owner, our neighbor, Mr. Fish, always told me that his dog was named for a
lake where he spent his summers swimming-“when I was a youth,” Mr. Fish would say. Poor Mr.
Fish: he didn’t know that the lake was named after Indian chiefs and higher-ups-and that naming a
stupid Labrador retriever “Sagamore” was certain to cause some unholy offense. As you shall see, it
did. But Americans are not great historians, and so, for years-educated by my neighbor-I thought that
sagamore was an Indian word for lake. The canine Sagamore was killed by a diaper truck, and I now
believe that the gods of those troubled waters of that much-abused lake were responsible. It would be
a better story, I think, if Mr. Fish had been killed by the diaper truck-but every study of the gods, of
everyone’s gods, is a revelation of vengeance toward the innocent. (This is a part of my particular
faith that meets with opposition from my Congregationalist and Episcopalian and Anglican friends.)
As for my ancestor John Wheelwright, he landed in Boston in , only two years before he bought our
town. He was from Lincolnshire, England-the hamlet of Saleby-and nobody knows why he named our
town Gravesend. He had no known contact with the British Gravesend, although that is surely where
the name of our town came from. Wheelwright was a Cambridge graduate; he’d played football with
Oliver Cromwell-whose estimation of Wheelwright (as a football player) was both worshipful and
paranoid. Oliver Cromwell believed that Wheelwright was a vicious, even a dirty player, who had
perfected the art of tripping his opponents and then falling on them. Gravesend (the British
Gravesend) is in Kent-a fair distance from Wheelwright’s stamping ground. Perhaps he had a friend
from there-maybe it was a friend who had wanted to make the trip to America with Wheelwright, but
who hadn’t been able to leave England, or had died on the voyage. According to Wall’s History
ofGravesend, N.H., the Rev. John Wheelwright had been a good minister of the English church until
he began to “question the authority of certain dogmas”; he became a Puritan, and was thereafter
“silenced by the ecclesiastical powers, for nonconformity.” I feel that my own religious confusion,
and stubbornness, owe much to my ancestor, who suffered not only the criticisms of the English
church before he left for the new world; once he arrived, he ran afoul of his fellow Puritans hi
Boston. Together with the famous Mrs. Hutchinson, the Rev. Mr. Wheelwright was banished from the
Massachusetts Bay Colony for disturbing’ ‘the civil peace”; in truth, he did nothing more seditious
than offer some heterodox opinions regarding the location of the Holy Ghost-but Massachusetts
judged him harshly. He was deprived of his weapons; and with his family and several of his bravest
adherents, he sailed north from Boston to Great Bay, where he must have passed by two earlier New
Hampshire outposts-what was then called Strawbery Banke, at the mouth of the Pascataqua (now
Portsmouth), and the settlement in Dover. Wheelwright followed the Squamscott River out of Great
Bay; he went as far as the falls where the freshwater river met the saltwater river. The forest would
have been dense then; the Indians would have showed him how good the fishing was. According to
Wall’s History of Gravesend, there were “tracts of natural meadow” and “marshes bordering upon the
tidewater.”
The local sagamore’s name was Watahantowet; instead of his signature, he made his mark upon the
deed in the form of his totem-an armless man. Later, there was some dispute -not very interestingregarding the Indian deed, and more interesting speculation regarding why Watahantowet’s totem was
an armless man. Some said it was how it made the sagamore feel to give up all that land-to have his
arms cut off-and others pointed out that earlier “marks” made by Watahantowet revealed that the
figure, although armless, held a feather in his mouth; this was said to indicate the sagamore’s
frustration at being unable to write. But in several other versions of the totem ascribed to
Watahantowet, the figure has a tomahawk in its mouth and looks completely crazy-or else, he is
making a gesture toward peace: no arms, tomahawk in mouth; together, perhaps, they are meant to
signify that Watahantowet does not fight. As for the settlement of the disputed deed, you can be sure
the Indians were The Foid Ball not the beneficiaries of the resolution to that difference of opinion.
And later still, our town fell under Massachusetts authority -which may, to this day, explain why
residents of Gravesend detest people from Massachusetts. Mr. Wheelwright would move to Maine.
He was eighty when he spoke at Harvard, seeking contributions to rebuild a part of the college
destroyed by a fire-demonstrating that he bore the citizens of Massachusetts less of a grudge than
anyone else from Gravesend would bear them. Wheelwright died in Salisbury, Massachusetts, where
he was the spiritual leader of the church, when he was almost ninety. But listen to the names of
Gravesend’s founding fathers: you will not hear a Meany among them. Barlow
Blackwell Cole
Copeland Crawley
Dearborn Hilton
Hutchinson Littleneld
Read Rishworth
Smart Smith
Walker Wardell
Wentworth Wheelwright
I doubt it’s because she was a Wheelwright that my mother never gave up her maiden name; I think my
mother’s pride was independent of her Wheelwright ancestry, and that she would have kept her
maiden name if she’d been born a Meany. And I never suffered in those years that I had her name; I
was little Johnny Wheelwright, father unknown, and-at the time-that was okay with me. I never
complained. One day, I always thought, she would tell me about it-when I was old enough to know the
story. It was, apparently, the kind of story you had to be “old enough” to hear. It wasn’t until she diedwithout a word to me concerning who my father was-that I felt I’d
been cheated out of information I had a right to know; it was only after her death that I felt the
slightest anger toward her. Even if my father’s identity and his story were painful to my mother-even if
their relationship had been so sordid that any revelation of it would shed a continuous, unfavorable
light upon both my parents-wasn’t my mother being selfish not to tell me anything about my father? Of
course, as Owen Meany pointed out to me, I was only eleven when she died, a …
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