Owen Meany Death

Death is a powerful event, always affecting those around it deeply. Death pushes people by taking away something they love, forcing them to fill the hole left in the aftermath. Each person deals with loss differently, choosing to let it impact them positively or negatively. Since the beginning of time death has inspired people to turn to religion, increasing their faith to reassure themselves that there is paradise and happiness in the afterlife. But, death has also caused people to lose faith, making them lose purpose and hope. The characters in A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving are greatly affected by death. A Prayer for Owen Meany is a story about how the narrator, John Wheelwright, got his faith in God. The novel contains all of John’s

Mr. Merrill becomes doubtful and loses his faith in God. Tabby is John’s mother, and Rev. Mr. Merrill was his father. John was their illegitimate child, as Mr. Merrill is a married man. When John talks to Rev. Mr. Merrill after Owen’s death, Rev. Mr. Merrill rejects the idea that Owen predicted his death, he has no faith in the possibility of miracles. John then says, “The Rev. Mr. Merrill confessed that he had no faith at all; he’d lost his faith, he told me, when my mother died” (553). Mr. Merrill constantly feels guilty about his affair with John’s mother, while Tabby quickly moves on. This angers Mr. Merrill, and at a baseball game he prays to God that Tabby would drop dead. At that moment, Tabby is killed and Mr. Merrill loses his faith. Because he prayed for her death, he feels remorseful and loses the power to pray to God, he loses his faith and becomes doubtful. When explaining Rev. Mr. Merrill’s style of preaching, John says, “[Mr. Merrill] was full of doubt; he expressed our doubt” (114). Although this doubt often reassured John, when he was a child, that he was not the only one who was doubtful towards God’s existence, as an adult John realizes that Mr. Merrill’s doubt is not good. Tabby’s death drove away the faithful and religiously passionate man Mr. Merrill once was, replacing him with a stuttering and doubtful one. Tabby’s mortality negatively affected Rev. Mr. Merrill, removing his

Mr. Merrill’s loss of faith after Tabby's death, Owen’s need to share his faith with John after he learns the date of his death, and the effect of Owen’s death on John show how mortality positively and negatively affects a person’s faith. Owen and John both are affected by mortality in a positive way. Owen uses it to motivate himself to spread his faith to John, and John uses Owen’s death to affirm his belief in God. On the other hand, Rev. Mr. Merrill is affected negatively. Mr. Merrill loses his faith when faced with Tabby’s death. The characters in A Prayer for Owen Meany show how mortality can affect a person’s faith. Death is a powerful event that can affect people in different ways. Some chose to allow it to affect them in a good way, and others in bad way. John, Owen and Rev. Mr. Merrill all make their choice on how to allow mortality to affect them, and this choice shapes their lives. The struggle with mortality is a common struggle, faced by almost everyone sometime in their life. Making the choice on how you let it affect you is important, as it can affect the rest of your life. By allowing mortality to affect him in a damaging way, Rev. Mr. Merrill becomes a doubtful and unhappy person. On the contrary, Owen uses his upcoming death to make sure he fulfils his goals in life, and John also uses death in a helpful way, allowing Owen’s death to expel his doubts. John Irving chooses to emphasize the effects of mortality because it is a common occurrence in real