59 pages • 1 hour read
John IrvingA Prayer for Owen Meany
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Little Lord Jesus”
Christmas 1953 is the first one without Tabby. John stays with Dan in the Gravesend Academy apartment. Dan leads the Gravesend Players in a performance of A Christmas Carol, as is tradition. Dan hopes to cast Owen as Tiny Tim, but Owen protests. Owen has been forced each year to play the angel in the Episcopalian church’s pageant—a role for which his small size proves beneficial as it allows him to be hoisted into the air.
With most of the students and faculty of the Academy gone for the holiday, John and Owen have the run of the boys’ dorm. Using a master key, they enter the rooms of the absent boys. Owen amuses them both by determining whether each student is happy based upon his room’s contents. They learn to locate hidden items, such as pornography and condoms.
When the rehearsals for the Christmas pageant begin, Owen refuses to perform the part of the angel. He nominates John to play Joseph, who in turn selects a quiet girl named Mary Beth Baird to play Mary. An awkward boy named Harold Crosby will play the angel. Owen further argues to the rector and his wife that the turtledoves are ridiculous and should be replaced by another animal, such as a cow. Mary Beth volunteers to make cow costumes, which later prove to be ridiculous. Owen further objects to the use of several infants as the Christ child—each one replaced once one begins crying. He convinces the rector and his wife that he should play the Christ child since he is small enough to fit in the crib. As rehearsals begin, Mary Beth wants to hold Owen, but Owen and the rector’s wife, Barb Wiggin, protest. Instead, Owen sits atop a mound of hay. Owen argues consistently about the biblical accuracy of several aspects of the performance.
During this particular Christmas season, Dan complains about the poor quality of acting in his A Christmas Carol production. A neighbor, Mr. Fish, joins in the complaining, as he is accustomed to playing the role of Scrooge. They criticize the ghosts most of all. Adult John, looking back, recalls the death of Mr. Fish’s dog, Sagamore, who was hit by a diaper truck while he and Owen played football with Mr. Fish one fall afternoon. He recalls, too, how fearful the woman hired to care for Lydia—named Germaine—was of Owen’s voice. Even John’s grandmother suggests that Owen contact Tabby’s former voice teacher to learn how to speak differently. However, Owen insists his voice “comes from God” (195).
An opportunity arises for Owen when the actor—the local mailman—playing the Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come quits. Owen, insistent that this ghost must strike fear in the audience, convinces Dan to let him try the role. When—covered in a black cloak—Owen accomplishes this goal, Dan gives him the part, thus saving Owen from the Tiny Tim role after all.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Ghost of the Future”
Owen’s performance as the Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come is a success; audiences love him, and he is praised in the local newspaper. His parents, however, do not attend any of the performances, despite Dan urging Owen to invite them. John suspects they do not know that Owen is performing in the play at all.
The day of the church pageant arrives, and Owen, who has been suffering a cold for weeks, is increasingly ill. Barb dresses Owen in swaddling clothes—a feat that takes some time, as Owen first complains of the swaddling being too tight, then insists he be wrapped with his lucky scarf (given to him by Tabby) underneath the swaddling clothes. The pageant, intended to be serious and reverent, ends up much more comedic, as the angel forgets his lines and must be prompted by the Christ child and Mary must repeatedly wipe the Christ child’s runny nose with a handkerchief. Near the end of the pageant, Mary falls onto Owen, and the two become tangled in the mound of hay. It is then that Owen spots his parents in the congregation—his crying mother being comforted by his father—and shouts at them to leave. He then insists John “get [him] out of t[here]” (225), so John carries him up the aisle, out of the church, and into the cab of the Meanys’ truck.
In Toronto, the adult John attends a Wednesday morning communion service. He muses on the differing approaches each of the ministers has to the administration of the communion rite. After the service, a church official engages in small talk about nuclear testing being done by the United States. This enrages John, and he enters a tirade about American history. John is adamant that he is no longer an American, but a Canadian.
Shifting the narrative to the past once again, John explains that after the spectacle of the pageant, he has never enjoyed Christmas. After Owen storms out of the church, no one in the congregation is quite sure what to do. All, except Mr. Fish—not a churchgoer—are in shock. John retrieves Owen’s clothing from Barb Wiggin, who insists that Owen must speak with her before he attempts to return to the church. Dan later reprimands her for this and her failure, in the confusion, to release Harold Crosby from the harness, where he remained airborne.
Due to Tabby’s death, Dan and John alter their Christmas Eve plans. Rather than go to Sawyer Depot to the home of John’s aunt, uncle, and cousins, they will attend the performance of A Christmas Carol and then a cast party. They convince John’s grandmother to attend the play. The audience is full of townspeople who have already seen the play, some more than once. As John studies their faces from the confines of backstage, he recalls his mother waving to someone in the bleachers before she was struck by the baseball. He imagines that person could have been his father. Scanning the audience, he recalls which of the faces were also at the game that day.
In the final scene that night, Owen faints. Off-stage, Dan attends to Owen, who has a fever. Owen insists that the cause of his fainting is that his own name—rather than Ebenezer Scrooge’s—appeared on the false headstone. Rev. Merrill of the Congregational Church supports Owen, insisting he had “a vision.” The pastor drives Owen, then John, home.
At his grandmother’s house, John finds Germaine hiding in the pantry. Upset, she reveals that Lydia passed away while Germaine was reading to her. When John’s grandmother and Dan arrive later, Germaine proposes that Owen foresaw Lydia’s death, mistakenly believing it was his own.
That night, John lies awake in his bedroom, Germaine in the other twin bed. He wishes he could telephone Owen. Instead, he tells Germaine that he believes her assertion that she heard Owen’s scream when Lydia died. While Germaine sleeps, John thinks of his father, wondering if he might be an evil man. Then he sneaks to the kitchen to phone Owen. He tells Owen what has transpired and shares his theory of his father’s presence at the baseball game, and Owen is supportive. Owen is adamant that his full name—Paul Owen Meany Junior—appeared on the headstone. John asks if a date of death appeared as well; when Owen says there was no date, John is certain Owen is lying.
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
Tabby’s death brings about significant life changes for John, including the changing of traditions. That his grandmother and Dan both seek to minimize the impact of her absence upon the first Christmas following her death speaks to their love of John and the protection they provide for him. Spending the holiday break with Dan at Gravesend Academy instead of in Sawyer Depot will bring about a new set of traditions for John, allowing him to grow closer to Owen.
The boys’ exploration of Gravesend Academy foreshadows the antics that Owen will carry out when he is a student there years later. Indeed, Gravesend Academy will prove to be one of the defining places in Owen’s life—one that will shape his future in unexpected ways when he fails to graduate, thus leading him to join the ROTC. The name of the school, which can be parsed to “grave send,” is notable as well: Both headstones and death are recurring motifs in the novel, and the theme of Mortality and the Inevitability of Death will loom over the rest of the narrative due to Owen’s budding belief that he will die on a specific day.
John finally acts upon his desire to discover his father’s identity by attempting to recreate the attendance at the baseball game. Though he has no proof, he is certain that whomever his mother was waving to just before she was stuck by the baseball had to be his father. Importantly, John believes this hypothesis must be the truth. In this way, John’s belief in his father’s identity parallel’s Owen’s certainty of God’s existence—further underscoring the theme of Religious Faith and Doubt. John, though he may not willingly admit it, clings to Owen’s insistence that God will one day reveal the identity of John’s father to him. In this way, John has more faith in Owen than he does in God—an aspect of John’s character that will remain consistent even when he gains a strong religious faith in his adulthood.
Many of the scenes throughout this section take a comical tone as they unfold. As both an adolescent and an adult, John appreciates the ridiculousness of the children’s reenactment of Christ’s birth and the hopelessness of the lackluster talent of the Gravesend Players’ A Christmas Carol. The children’s performances underscore the importance of tradition in Gravesend—a town that prides itself on both its heritage and its moral certitude. By the end of the novel, however, several aspects of both the church pageant and the performance of A Christmas Carol will take on a deeper, more significant meaning than comic relief.
Owen’s insistence on being the Christ child—rather than the angel—in the Christmas pageant may initially strike readers as self-centered and comical, but it has greater significance. Owen presents this suggestion as if it is a matter of logic and practicality—he is small enough to fit in the creche and, unlike “real” babies, will not cry and disrupt the performance. Indeed, the notion that Owen’s small size makes him unique is a frequent trope. When Mr. Meany reveals to John years later that Owen was the result of a virgin birth, Owen’s role as Christ takes on greater meaning. The pageant takes place around the time Owen gained this knowledge and thus marks the beginning of him regarding himself as an instrument of God. Owen’s Christ-like quality, then, is taken to a literal extreme. John and others believe Owen overstates his own significance during his life, but after Owen’s death, John will come to understand why Owen held such beliefs.
Finally, Owen’s insistence that his name and date of death appear on the prop headstone in the performance of A Christmas Carol sets in motion a defining aspect of the novel’s conflict: Owen believes he has been presented with a glimpse of the future. With this, Irving consciously builds upon the notion of Dickens’s “Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come.” John attempts to convince Owen that he is mistaken in what he saw; Owen’s fever during the pageant lends credibility to John’s admonishment. Nonetheless, Owen remains adamant. Further, the death of Lydia that same night—and Geraldine’s insistence that she heard Owen’s voice when Lydia passed—reinforces Owen’s assertion that he has been chosen as an instrument of God. It will become increasingly key, too, in Owen’s belief that his destiny is fixed and cannot be changed, developing the novel’s theme of Destiny and Human Agency.
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