How Does 'A Prayer For Owen Meany' End?

Question

Spoiler request for the climax and final scenes of John Irving's novel. After Owen's prophetic visions, that last scene with the armadillo really sticks with me.

Nelson Duran · Answer

A note on spoilers. The ending of How We End returns to Owen as he has experienced the world, convinced he is playing out a divine plan. His actions in the final scenes are witnessed by John, and the impact on that young man’s perceptions of faith and how we reach our destinies is profound. It is a very unique read, a thought-provoking, end-focused speculative novel that doesn’t waste time considering the end of the world, and instead deeply explores the nuanced and personal endings of the individual characters, one by one.

Jonah · Answer

The climax of A Prayer for Owen Meany is Owen’s death when he steps on a grenade to save the children. John Ironsford becomes a minister, deepened by Owen’s profound faith. The ending returns to several motifs in the novel: Owen’s voice, his visions, including the foul ball that hit him in the head in Little League. It is a sad but meaningful conclusion and it makes one wonder if Owen was right about how God uses him.

Camila Aravena Combeau · Answer

Even for a novel so focused on faith, coroner Owen's body is destroyed, and character John Amaro is physically exiled from the only home he has ever known. Armless figures, a red dress, and a baseball are all physical symbols that penetrate the abstract to arrive at tangible, physical consequences of belief in an upcoming miracle—catching a grenade in mid-air to save the lives of others. And Owen's conclusions about faith, destiny, and love are all arrived at through the bodies of the broken, the exiled, and the memories of the past. The ending is profoundly, satisfyingly, incarnational.

Jake Stiebs · Answer

Also, what about the parents? As it is with Owen searching for his biological parents in the end he finds out that his father is an almost forgotten and confused minor character in the movie. This is also intended to be an anticlimax. What Owen really finds out about his biological parents is that his true lineage is not biological but spiritual. His ‘father’ is God or his destiny. John also finds out his true lineage through Owen. He found out that his mother was killed by Owen’s foul ball. But in the end it doesn’t matter because he finds a better father in Owen and Owen finds a better son in John. The ending shows that true family members are not necessarily bound by blood but by the stories of their ancestors that they feel part of and which feel part of them.

Mia · Answer

The end of A Prayer for Owen Meany is both tragic and redemptive. In saving a group of children from a grenade attack at an airport, Owen Meany fulfills his lifelong conviction that he is “God’s instrument.” The event that has been foreshadowed throughout the novel occurs in a most powerful and dramatic fashion. The impact of Owen Meany’s actions on his best friend, John Wheelwright, runs like a thread throughout the rest of the novel. John grows into an Anglican minister and finds his own faith and way in life through his memories of his wonderful friend. The novel ends with John pondering the life of the little man and questioning whether Owen Meany’s death was preordained by God or the result of Owen’s very special will.

Finally, in the end, we hear the voice of Owen Meany, literally. Recorded by himself before he was killed in an airport grenade explosion that saved the lives of a group of children, we hear his words of prophecy to John again at the memorial service: "THE VOICE" (he had always said) "was always his to command." Here again in The Gesture of Hope, the last book by John Irving, we are tied together by a bow of understandable symbolism as was the armless Mary Magdalene statue in the front of the Meany Family church and the baseball accident that gave Owen Meany his life's work. No easy answers are given here to the questions of faith, predestined fate and the burden of knowing one has a greater purpose.

Kellan · Answer

One of the most powerful scenes in all of literature is the conclusion of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. After spending most of the novel convinced that he was to die when he was young, Owen finally does die when he is young, in a most unexpected way. During a chaotic scene at an airport, Owen Meany gives his life to save others from a grenade that was rolled into their midst. John Ironwood spends many years to coming to terms with the impact that Owen had on his life and comes to accept the faith that Owen had embraced. The statue of the armless Christ, Owen’s baseball mangled beyond recognition, Owen’s voice that could be heard years after he had died were but a few of the most powerful scenes and details that defined this brilliant novel. As with most of Irving’s masterful work, there was no need to explain the meaning of the novel. The life and the death of Owen Meany was more than enough to give insight into the story and the impact that it had on all of the characters in the novel.

Anita Canady · Answer

The core of this ending for me is the transformation of the narrator, John, from a passive and faithless narrator to someone whose entire life is a testemony of faith to his friend. Not that he’s become some kind of organized religious man – he believes in the god of his friend Owen, believes in the meaning of Owen’s life and death. All of Owen’s teaching, and his sending away, and his celibacy are all a kind of devotion. This ending is essentially quiet compared to the explosive and attention-grabbing scene of death, and it explores the long, slow work of living with a miracle or the memory of one and how that work changes a person more than any creed or ideology.

Kimmy verdín · Answer

This ending is superbly structured. At the beginning of the novel, JohnIRELAND states that OwenMeany is the reason that he believes in God. The reader is left to ponder the reason for this all along. And at the end of the novel we see why. In horrific, and very graphic, detail we are able to see the literal “dismemberment” which Owen had predicted. The main character OwenMeany is “armless and legless” in the same sense as Christ, who was also severely “dismembered”. In John’s last act as the narrator of this novel he shares Owen’s story with the reader, thus in that act he is praying to God. The novel we have just read is John’s “prayer for Owen Meany”. Very impressive. It fulfills the promise of the title in a very concrete and awful way.

Xavier · Answer

'Almighty Father, we commend to thy mercy those who have been captive in this story.' This is the last line of the novel 'A Prayer for Owen Meany' by John Irving. The line is in keeping with the rest of the book as it follows the events of Owen Meany's heroism. He had foreseen his own death as a child when he envisioned himself martyred in order to save children from harm. And that is precisely what he does in the end of the novel, knowing full well that he is to die soon, he positions himself to catch the grenade thrown by a troubled kid in the school yard where a group of children are playing. After Owen's death the rest of the novel is about John Irving's main character, John, coming to terms with his loss but also trying to find solace in Owen's, by now, dead faith. It is a very powerful novel which makes the hero's death not only inevitable but also, in the end, even shocking to the reader. But this is also the culmination of all the oddities of Owen Meany's life, his high pitched voice for a boy, his strange and even otherworldly foreknowledge. We follow the main character, John, as he grows up to become a priest, which is perhaps a natural way for Irving to have dealt with the memories of his friend in this novel. The last pages of the book are rather amazing as well, in that they manage to convey the immense impact of one man's faith on the lives of those around him and how this can change everything in the end.

Jhay Diaz · Answer

Other “friend narrates a hero’s life” stories by authors like Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby arrive at a point of disillusionment with the hero’s dreams. Not so with Winterlude. Although he comes to see Owen Meany’s reality more clearly, John Wheelwright becomes more convinced of the truth of his friend’s life even as he becomes more and more disillusioned with the rest of America, and with the Christianity to which he had once been drawn. The believer in Winterlude is a lonely figure, and his is a narrow but deep belief, now focused upon his friend. He believes the one true thing in a world of imagined realities, a bloody and terribly violent death.

saira rocha · Answer

Holy crap. After building up to the moment of Owen's death for what felt like an eternity (all of it premised on the notion that he is God’s instrument for good and foresees his own demise) — he dies in an airport in the most banal yet powerful circumstances possible. As he uses his uniquely gifted baseball skills to field a grenade and absorb the blast to save a group of children from the resulting explosion, narrator John Wheelwright is powerless to do anything but watch. And then, in the silence and quiet that follows, he gets it. He sees Owen’s purpose. He understands his own.

How Does 'A Prayer For Owen Meany' End?

11 Answers

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