A Prayer for Owen Meany: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

John feels sick whenever anyone today reminisces positively about the sixties. He thinks that there was practically no irony in those days—everyone was so self-righteous, even in their muddled thinking. Hester failed as a folksinger and songwriter because no one appreciated her irony. When she was just Hester Eastman, an earnest nobody, she flopped. But when she transformed herself into a hard-rock star, a queen of the grittiest and coarsest style of rock ’n’ roll, she became a household name: Hester the Molester.

John’s students are impressed that he’s related to Hester, and they always ask him for tickets to her Toronto shows. He goes with them and brings them backstage to meet Hester, where she tells the girls to sleep with him if they want safe sex, because he’s a virgin. The girls giggle at her joke, never imagining that it’s the truth. John is a virgin, and Hester knows it. He no longer has any interest in losing his virginity; what has happened to him has “simply neutered” him, he thinks. Katherine’s husband is partially correct in that John just doesn’t feel like “practicing” anything.

Hester has stayed virginal to the memory of Owen Meany—he was the love of her life, and she never became as seriously involved with anyone else. She only sleeps with younger guys who don’t expect anything from her. John thinks that Hester’s music videos are quite ugly, with electric bass distorting her voice and shots of her liaisons with young men intermixed with shots of Vietnam War footage. John’s students’ generation find Hester and her commentary “profound and humane,” which makes John sick. He believes that they were both damaged by what happened by Owen, but Hester has channeled her damage into incredible fame and fortune. She has created “a mindless muddle of sex and protest” out of her and Owen’s suffering. What an irony, John thinks.

John thinks Owen would have scoffed at Hester’s music videos. Hester wears lots of crucifixes—she likes them or she likes to mock them. John appreciates her song titles, at least, and he believes that she has an equal right to interpret the silence that Owen left behind. Owen hasn’t left perfect silence behind him, however. John heard from him one night at Harriet’s old house, where John was staying with Dan. They were drinking and talking about Harriet’s last years in the house. They kept her at home as long as they could, even convincing the grocery store to make special deliveries for her. But she was going senile, and she wouldn’t recognize the delivery boys.

Harriet also lost her hair and had to resort to wigs, which she would hide from her maids. Eventually she had to go into the seniors’ home. Dan says that her preserved jellies are still in the secret passageway, and John goes to see them for himself. He can’t find the light switch, and then Dan shuts the door on him. He gropes for the light, and feels something awful to the touch—one of Harriet’s old wigs. He steps backward, yelling, and begins to lose his balance on top of the stairs.

John is saved from falling to his death by “a small, strong hand” that guides his hand to the light switch and pulls him forward. He hears Owen’s voice saying, “DON’T BE AFRAID. NOTHING BAD IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU.” When Dan opens the door, he sees that the roots of John’s hair have turned white. The next morning, Dan is somewhat skeptical of John’s claim to have felt and heard Owen. John points out that Owen’s voice is unmistakable, but Dan only says that they were very drunk.

The summer of 1967, John’s finger was healing. Owen was promoted to first lieutenant. He helped John start his Master’s thesis on Thomas Hardy, explaining his view that Hardy was almost religious—he came so close to believing that his eventual rejection of religion made him very bitter. He tells John about a line from Hardy’s diary that Hardy wrote to explain his disinterest in theories like religion: “Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.”

Back in the present, it’s August and John is visiting Dan in Gravesend. Harriet left her house to Dan and John when she died, and Dan wants John to move back. John thinks of August as their month to talk about teaching together, and he doesn’t want to talk about moving back to America. He complains to Dan that his students fail to recognize wit in the works they read; he believes they would see more of it if they could see the work performed, like Dan does. Meanwhile, Dan tries to convince him to forgive and forget, and come home already. Even Owen wouldn’t blame the whole country for what happened to him.

“There is too much forgetting,” John thinks. He tried to forget who his father could be, only once calling Mr. McSwiney, who also told him to forget about it. McSwiney told him again that Owen should go see a doctor—there wasn’t any good reason not to fix his voice. In Owen’s case, there really was a reason. John tried to tell Dan and Rev. Merrill about that reason, but they didn’t fully believe him. “I believe you,” Dan said neutrally. Merrill says that to believe the whole story “calls upon more faith than I have.”

Merrill insists that it’s harder for him to believe in a supposed miracle as someone who has been both filled with faith and filled with doubt, as compared to John who hasn’t lost his newfound faith yet. He also says that miracles shouldn’t cause faith; one has to already have faith to believe in true miracles. He agrees that Owen was very gifted, and very emotional. He believes that Owen experienced some disturbing visions, but doesn’t believe that every instance of precognition can be ascribed to God.

One day in the present August vacation, John lies down on the couch where Hester once laid down while John, Noah and Simon searched the house for Owen. He finds a baseball card under the couch cushions and realizes that Owen had been lying under the couch cushions—under Hester—the whole time they looked for him.

Harriet’s decline at the seniors’ home was quick and painless; she died in her sleep two weeks before she would have turned one hundred. Her birthday was on Halloween, which she hated. She also would have hated a big celebration that called attention to her age. She died in front of the TV, the remote clutched in her hand, stuck on the button to change the channel.

In the present, it’s September—time to go back to school. At a staff meeting, John again requested to teach Günter Grass’s book Cat and Mouse to his Grade 13 girls, but another English teacher called the book “nasty,” saying, “The masturbation scene alone is offensive to women.” He finds this female teacher very disagreeable, and is looking forward to catching her off guard with his missing index finger. It’s not grotesque-looking, since Owen made the cleanest cut possible. The only thing wrong with the hand, and the only thing wrong with John, is what’s missing: “Owen Meany is missing.”

At the end of the summer of 1967, Hester tells Owen she won’t go to his funeral. She says she’ll do anything—get married, move to Arizona, have his children—except go to his funeral. And she sticks to her word; she doesn’t go to his funeral. Owen never asked her to marry him or move for him, saying it wouldn’t be fair to her. Owen strikes a deal with a Major General at Fort Huachuca who is impressed with his body escort service: if he stays as a body escort for eighteen more months, the Major General will get him “a good job in Vietnam.” Hester questions how Owen could possibly believe in such a thing as “a good job in Vietnam.”

Hester and John attend an anti-war march in Washington fifty-thousand people strong. She questions why Owen didn’t also cut off his own finger and save himself, if he’s so smart. John leaves the march, and Hester stays and gets arrested. John thinks that the protestors’ righteousness simply hardened the attitudes of those who supported the war. Rather than “giving aid and comfort to the enemy,” as Reagan later claimed the protestors did, they gave fuel to the pro-war Americans.

Perhaps the protests worked against the protestors, helping to extend rather than end the war. Either way, it did not end soon enough to save Owen. He was placed in a closed casket, draped with a U.S. flag with his medal pinned to it. He was given a full military funeral with honors, and Mr. Meany and Mrs. Meany asked that he be buried in Gravesend rather than Arlington. Rev. Wiggin, a supporter of the war, wanted to hold the funeral in his church, but John convinced the Meanys to hold the service in Hurd’s Church, with Rev. Merrill. Mr. Meany was still mad at Gravesend Academy for kicking Owen out, but John said Owen would be more upset if Wiggin performed his service rather than Merrill.

Owen’s funeral was held in the summer of 1968, not long after Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated and Hair had opened on Broadway within the same month. John is sick of people who pretend to be radical but stand by as tragedy and violence run riot. At the Meanys’ house, Mrs. Meany stares into the dead ashes of the fireplace while Mr. Meany talks with John. He believes that the government has given them $50,000, while John knows that the money came from Harriet. John goes into Owen’s bedroom and sees that Owen attached the severed arms from the statue of Mary Magdalene to Tabitha’s armless dummy. He sees that Owen never unpacked his baseball cards after John gave them back to him. He sees how withered the armadillo’s claws became. He doesn’t see the fatal baseball.

Mr. Meany says the baseball was never there—he looked for it in Owen’s room for years, and never found it. John unpacks Owen’s duffel bag for his family. Inside is Owen’s diary, his copy of St. Thomas Aquinas’s writings, and his Bible. Mr. Meany sits down with John and tells him that Owen wasn’t born naturally. Mrs. Meany shouts at him to stop talking. Mr. Meany explains that Owen had been a virgin birth, since he and Mrs. Meany never had sex. Nobody ever believed them.

Mrs. Meany continues to order Mr. Meany to stop talking, and John thinks that she’s perfectly crazy—possibly even mentally disabled. She might not have known what sex was, or might have been lying all these years, or might have repressed or forgotten the experience due to trauma or mental disability. Mr. Meany believed his wife had conceived Owen as a virgin, like Jesus’s mother Mary, but none of the Catholic priests believed him. Wherever he went, they accused him of blasphemy. His parents told Owen when he was ten or eleven, around when he hit the fatal baseball.

John thinks that he could kill Mr. Meany and Mrs. Meany for their ignorance. He thinks of them as “monsters of superstition,” and “dupes.” He feels that Owen has been used cruelly both by ignorance and by design, and that Mrs. Meany should have been sterilized. Mr. Meany tells John to come to the monument shop; Mrs. Meany again tells him to “Stop!” John hadn’t been to the workshop since his amputation. Owen spent a lot of time in the shop over the Christmas holidays in 1967, and also spent a lot of time practicing the shot with John, as usual. Losing his finger didn’t stop John from doing the shot, although it gave him difficulty with writing, eating, and typing.

Owen didn’t see much of Hester that Christmas. Her refusal to attend his funeral seemed to have hurt him. She became more and more radically opposed to the war in 1968, and Owen didn’t try very hard to reconcile with her. John believes Owen wanted Hester to fall out of love with him before he died. In the monument shop, Mr. Meany shows John Owen’s gravestone, with his full name, dates of birth and death, and Latin inscription for “forever.” John is surprised to see how well-carved the headstone is, given Mr. Meany’s lack of carving skill. Mr. Meany says it’s all Owen’s work—he even inscribed the exact date of death, six months before he died.

Rev. Merrill agrees with John that Mr. Meany is a “monster of superstition” and Mrs. Meany is likely mentally disabled, and he shares John’s horror that they told Owen their belief when he was still so young and impressionable. He says that Owen talked to him and Father Findley about his parents’ ideas, causing them both to pity him. Owen didn’t believe he was Jesus, but he did challenge Merrill by asking him why he couldn’t believe in another virgin birth.

Owen did believe that everything that happened to him had a purpose, that he was picked by God. Merrill only believes that Owen was gifted with some “precognitive powers.” John is angry that Merrill would treat Owen like an intellectual problem rather than acknowledging that his life was miraculous or extraordinary. Merrill warns him not to confuse his grief for Owen with real religious belief. John says that Merrill’s doubt has overwhelmed him, as Owen suspected. They sit without speaking until John asks what Merrill will say about Owen at his funeral. Merrill doesn’t reply, and John remembers his silence in The Great Hall.

John thinks that Merrill treats religion like a career, preaching without believing or opening his heart to a new manifestation of God’s will. In Merrill’s vestry office, John suddenly feels Owen near. Merrill turns on the lamp and opens his mouth without speaking, choking on his words. Finally he speaks in Owen’s voice: “LOOK IN THE THIRD DRAWER, RIGHT-HAND SIDE.” Merrill opens the desk drawer and out falls a baseball, undoubtedly the fatal ball that killed Tabitha. “Forgive me, my s-s-s-son!” Merrill stutters.

This was the first time Owen spoke to John from the beyond, the second being when he saved John in the secret passageway this August. John thinks that Owen should understand by now that John knows he is there—even without seeing or hearing him. Owen promised John that God would tell him who his father was, and John isn’t surprised that God spoke to him in Owen’s voice. Merrill denies that God was working through him; he suggests that he had finally found the courage to reveal himself to John by using a voice not his own. He would rather blame his subconscious than believe in divine intervention. John asks if he’s a pastor or a psychologist.

Merrill then confesses that he has no faith at all—he lost it when Tabitha died. He had been at the game, Tabitha had waved to him, and he had prayed for her to drop dead. Seeing her always filled him with guilt and self-disgust after their affair. He believes that God listened to him when he asked for Tabitha to die, and has not listened to him since. John thinks that Merrill is no different from Mr. Meany and Mrs. Meany—they all used self-centered religion for their own ends.

Tabitha and Merrill had an affair after she asked him to come to The Orange Grove and confirm that she was not doing anything dishonorable by singing at the supper club. John says it was a sincere affair—Merrill sincerely believed he was in love with Tabitha, who was sincerely innocent. But Merrill never intended to leave his wife and children, and quickly felt ashamed. Tabitha soon got over him, and didn’t trouble herself with guilt or anguish over their affair. But Merrill wallowed in guilt and remorse after being forced to accept that he would never find the courage to abandon his miserable family for Tabitha.

John finds his father to be an utter failure. He says sarcastically to Merrill, “How I wish I could help you restore your faith.” He feels “moved to do evil,” and he recalls how Owen warned him that his father would disappoint him.

Back in Toronto in September, John thinks about how Katherine says the most un-Christian thing about him is his unwillingness to forgive. He is sitting in Grace Church, reflecting again on the Thirty-seventh psalm: “Leave off from wrath…else shalt thou be moved to do evil.” He is again upset at his students, resenting their disengagement from literature and their infatuation with rock music.

After John learns about Merrill, he doesn’t know what to tell Dan. He asks Dan why he insisted that Tabitha change churches before getting married. Dan says he thought that John had insisted on changing churches to be with Owen. Dan’s actually a Presbyterian. Tabitha lied to them. John asks Dan why he and Tabitha waited so long to get married. Dan says John’s father made Tabitha wait; he wanted her to be sure about marrying Dan. Tabitha wanted John’s father never to identify himself to John, and he wouldn’t promise her anything if she didn’t wait to marry Dan. It took four years for him to promise never to tell John the truth. Tabitha never wanted John, or Dan, to know who John’s father was.

Dan says he doesn’t believe that John’s father was jealously trying to derail their marriage—he truly wanted Tabitha to be sure about her husband, and truly wanted his son to know who he was one day. John asks him if he knew about The Orange Club, and “The Lady in Red,” and Buster Freebody. Dan says he knew about all that, and went with Tabitha to Buster’s funeral. John decides that Dan doesn’t need to know about Merrill being John’s real father. He also thinks of a plan to restore Merrill’s faith with a “miracle.”

John drives to Owen’s house and picks up his mother’s dummy, still wearing her red dress. He places the dummy in the flower beds under the stained-glass windows of the church. In the dusk, it looks like Tabitha is hovering above the flowers, her missing head and feet consumed by shadows. He takes the baseball and throws it through the stained-glass window, then hides behind a tree.

Merrill comes outside, spots Tabitha’s dummy, and falls to his knees, clutching the baseball to his heart. He drops the ball and prays: “God—forgive me!...Tabby—forgive me, please!” He covers his eyes with his hands and slumps to the ground, babbling to himself. John retrieves the dummy and the baseball and drives to Rye Harbor, where he used to sit with Owen. He throws the baseball into the harbor, along with Mary Magdalene’s arms. He climbs out along the breakwater to throw the dummy as far out into the ocean as he can, into the deepest water. He hugs it for a moment, then throws it in the sea.

John watches the sun rise over the harbor, and then returns to Hester’s apartment to shower and dress for Owen’s funeral. He hasn’t seen Hester since they watched Bobby Kennedy’s assassination together on Harriet’s television: “Television gives good disaster.” Owen didn’t have anything to say about it, for once; he was too concerned with his own impending death. John packs up his belongings and reads Owen’s diary. Owen had written down Vietnamese vocabulary and expressions, especially “COMMAND FORMS OF VERBS,” like “LIE DOWN” and “DON’T BE AFRAID.”

In the margin of one page, Owen wrote, “THIRD DRAWER, RIGHT-HAND SIDE.” He must have seen the baseball the day that he mounted the statue on the stage of The Great Hall, and sat behind Merrill’s desk. He knew then who John’s father was, but he knew that God would tell John himself—and he knew that John would be let down. He wrote about John in the diary, saying that cutting off his “BEST FRIEND’S FINGER” was “THE HARDEST THING I EVER HAD TO DO.” He says that after he dies, John should “MAKE A CLEAN BREAK FROM THE PAST” and go to Canada.

John packs the diary with the rest of his things and heads to Harriet’s house to pick up some photographs and clothes. He has breakfast in the rose garden with Harriet, and tells her where he plans to go next. Then he goes to Dan’s apartment to get the granite doorstep Owen carved as a wedding gift for him and Tabitha. He also tells Dan his plans, and says to him, “You’re the best father a boy ever had—and the only father I ever needed.” Then they go to Owen’s funeral.

Chief Pike stands at the door of the church as if he’s going to frisk the mourners for the missing baseball. Coach Chickering is there, and Buzzy Thurston’s parents, who recently buried their own son. Father Findley and Mrs. Hoyt are there; the Wiggins are not. A unit of the New Hampshire National Guard serves as Owen’s honor guard. Owen’s favorite professor of Military Science from the University of New Hampshire is there; he tells John that they were clearly wrong about Owen’s suitability for combat.

Sunlight shines through the new hole in the stained-glass windows made by John’s baseball, reflecting against the medal pinned to the flag on Owen’s casket. Mr. Meany and Mrs. Meany stare at the medal and the casket as if they expect Owen to rise and condemn them for coming to his funeral. Mr. Fish and Harriet sit behind them, with Alfred, Martha, and Simon. Noah is still abroad with the Peace Corps and Hester is nowhere to be found. Harold Crosby is sitting across the aisle from John. John recalls hearing that Harold was coached by Mrs. Hoyt into securing a psychological deferment.

Mrs. Walker is there, and Arthur and Amanda Downing. Larry O’Day and his daughter Caroline, John’s former girlfriend, are there, with Maureen Early. Mr. Morrison is there. Randy White’s replacement as headmaster is there. The Brinker-Smiths returned to England in opposition to the war, not wanting their twins to be Americans. Even the Gravesend Academy janitor is there.

Rev. Merrill starts to speak with a newly firm and forceful voice; now that he has regained his faith, he preaches with “absolute belief in every word he uttered.” He reads multiple moving passages from the Bible, and says, “Compared to Owen Meany, I am an amateur—in my faith.” He admits that he wonders at times if God’s existence makes any difference to the world, and when he feels most faithful, he is also full of hard questions to ask God: “For example, I would like to ask God to give us back Owen Meany…O God—I shall keep asking You!” Harriet cries at this.

When Merrill is done, the honor guard folds Owen’s flag and hands it to Mr. Meany and Mrs. Meany. The recessional hymn is the same one played at Tabitha’s funeral. It’s another summer funeral, and they can still hear the children nearby playing baseball. Merrill prays over Owen’s grave, and John listens with careful attention, knowing that he is listening to his father for the last time. What will they need of each other after this, when Merrill has his faith once more and John has Dan? John thinks that Merrill is a fraud for ignoring the real miracle of Owen Meany and finding God in a dummy. Owen would say, “GOD WORKS IN STRANGE WAYS!”

As John is leaving the cemetery, a woman with three children approaches him. At first he doesn’t recognize her, until she asks him if he remembers how they used to lift Owen up. It’s Mary Beth Baird, who got pregnant in high school and dropped out to marry the father, a dairy farmer. She asks John, “How could he have been so light?” John can’t speak—he doesn’t want to hear his own voice, only Owen’s. When Mary Beth speaks to him, he knows Owen is gone.

John crosses the border to Canada, showing his missing finger when he’s asked if he’s a draft dodger. He lands in Toronto purely by chance. He thinks that Owen must have been so let down to learn that John’s mysterious father was merely “an insipid soup of a man.” Merrill was so forgettable that John and Owen never remembered seeing him at their baseball game, even though they saw him in the audience of all of Dan’s plays. John was let down to learn that his father was “just another Joseph…just another man like me.” He believes like his father used to, swinging back and forth between faith and doubt.

John doesn’t hate Merrill, but he doesn’t care about him much. He hasn’t seen him since Owen’s funeral. Dan says he’s a great preacher now, without a trace of his former stutter. John sometimes feels jealous of his father’s “absolute and unshakeable faith”; he wants to be tricked into forgetting his doubt, too. John knows what real miracles are, but he despairs at the many unanswerable questions his faith poses. How could Owen have known what he did? If God was behind Owen’s knowledge, that poses the terrible question: how could God have let this happen to him?

Owen taught John to keep a diary, which is much less interesting than Owen’s own. One highlight is when a rock-music journalist stopped him for an interview about Hester’s early years. John tells him to look up Owen Meany if he wants to know who first influenced Hester. He also wrote about returning to Gravesend for Harriet’s funeral at the Congregational Church, performed by Merrill’s replacement. At Harriet’s old house, he was shocked to see Mr. Meany in the garden, reading the electric meter. His granite company was gone, and this was his new part-time job. Mrs. Meany had died not long after her son; she died of complications from burns. She had been sitting by the fireplace when a spark ignited the American flag she wore like a shawl.

John sees Mr. Meany still wearing Owen’s medal, which survived when the flag burned. He thinks of Hardy’s quote about “living in a world where nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.” He thinks that he will never forget how Owen died.

On the 4th of July in 1968, John sits on the porch of Harriet’s house, waiting for the parade. He will go to the University of Massachusetts for his Ph.D. in the fall. Without work to do or teaching to plan—he’s not even teaching in the fall—he feels worthless. He watches the fireworks with Hester later, and she says she won’t marry or start a family with anyone if she can’t do so with Owen. Late that night, Owen calls, saying there’s an emergency with a missing body they just recovered. He wants John to meet him in Phoenix, where he can get a few days free to hang out after delivering the body.

John thinks it’s a long way to go for a few days, but he agrees to join Owen, who sounds agitated. He thinks Owen needs the company, since they haven’t seen each other since Christmas. “YOU’RE MY BEST FRIEND,” Owen tells him, and his voice breaks a bit. When John lands in Phoenix, he notices the tall palm trees at the airport. The only bathroom he can find is a temporary restroom set up while the other one is out of order. It’s a dark, high-ceilinged room, an old storage closet of some kind, with a large industrial sink and a small, high window.

John waits for Owen’s plane with the family of the fallen soldier. An Army officer is standing with them, a local ROTC professor. The family is angry—they have been waiting for their son’s body for three days. The dead soldier’s sister is pregnant, and very young. Her other brother is even younger than her—not more than fourteen or fifteen, very thin but so tall that he looks like he could morph into a monster if he gained weight. His anger already seems monstrous.

Owen writes in his diary on the plane to Phoenix. He thought he would die in Vietnam, but there’s no time left to get there. He’s wrong either about where or when he dies. He says that he didn’t like knowing about his death at first, but now he doesn’t like not knowing: “GOD IS TESTING ME.” He doesn’t understand why John is still in his dream after Owen kept him out of the war. He wanted to save John’s life by cutting off his finger, so bringing him to Arizona before the date of his death seems hypocritical. Owen can only have faith in God, who has promised him that nothing bad would happen to John.

Owen wonders if the date—and everything else—was just a figment of his imagination. He wonders how there could possibly be Vietnamese children in Arizona. He even asks God how, if he doesn’t actually save any children, He could have put him through everything. He finally sees the palm trees as his plane descends.

On the runway, Owen formally covers the casket with a flag. A hearse takes the coffin away. The family approaches Owen, and John sees that the teenage boy is dressed in jungle fatigues and wearing a cartridge belt loaded with ammo and other Army equipment, including a machete and a bayonet. His sister, who looks sixteen or seventeen, begins to cry. The boy spits tobacco, and she asks him to stop. “Fuck you,” he replies. The father punches him in the face and he falls to the tarmac. The boy says the girl is not his sister but his half-sister, and the man is not his father. He pulls the machete and the bayonet on the man.

Owen interrupts, telling the boy he likes his bayonet sheath. The family is frozen by Owen’s voice. The boy calls Owen a twit and asks him what’s wrong with his voice. Owen asks the boy what’s wrong with him—if he wants to dress up and play soldier, he should know how to talk to an officer. The bully respects being bullied.

In the major’s car, John and Owen can finally greet each other. The major, whose name is Rawls, explains that the family of the dead soldier is a mess. Rawls had earned a battlefield commission in Korea; he’d served the army for nineteen years, after enlisting at eighteen. He is very cynical, and predicts that the soldier’s family is full of incest. The teen boy hangs around the airport all day, watching the planes and talking to the soldiers. He wants to fight like his brother, who was on his third tour.

Rawls offers to find John and Owen dates or show them where to buy porn while they’re in town, but Owen says they just want to hang out and relax. Rawls laughs and asks if they’re gay. “MAYBE WE ARE,” Owen says, and Rawls laughs more, calling him “the funniest little fucker in the Army.” At the funeral home, Owen introduces John as the Army’s “BODY EXPERT.” He makes John look at the dead body after he identifies it. The soldier died when he made a mistake refueling a helicopter.

Owen, John, and Rawls head to the family’s ongoing wake, which Rawls treats like a spectacle. Unexpectedly, Owen says that in his experience, the Catholics honor death best—they have “THE PROPER SOLEMNITY, THE PROPER SORT OF RITUALS.” The family’s house is overflowing with people who are sick of waiting three days for a funeral. Rawls says there’s not a woman there he would sleep with, besides the pregnant girl. Out of the whole family, she has made the most effort to be nice to them. She looks liable to be beaten or assaulted by the rest of her murderously crazy family.

Inside the house, Owen asks the girl where her brother is and what his name is, so he can speak to him. She tells Owen his name is Dick. Rawls tells Owen that the police at the airport never take their eyes off this kid. Owen knocks on Dick’s door and gets him to let them in. His face is blackened for camouflage, and his bare chest has black circles drawn around his nipples. He clearly dreams of “butchering the Viet Cong” like his brother, Frank Jarvits. Frank smuggled home bayonets, machetes, an AK-47, and even two grenades as souvenirs for Dick.

Rawls tells Dick he had better not bring the rifle or the grenades to the airport. He’s not even sure if the bayonets or machetes are legal. Dick says sometimes the police confiscate them and give them back on the same day. Rawls tells Owen that Dick is beyond saving, but Owen says, “IT’S NOT UP TO US: WHO’S BEYOND SAVING.” Rawls says Owen is too good for this world.

The next day, Owen writes in his diary about his fear for the future of kids like Dick who never learned real morality, who only know a simplistic, antagonistic mindset: “THEY’RE SO SURE THEY’RE RIGHT! THAT’S PRETTY SCARY.” He doesn’t tell John that he thinks he’s going to die tomorrow. When John asks what they should do all day, Owen says, “LET’S JUST HAVE A GOOD TIME.” They try to find a gym to practice the shot in, but there’s none nearby, and Owen finally says, “I’M PRETTY SURE WE’VE PRACTICED THAT DUMB SHOT ENOUGH.” They pass the day drinking beer by the pool and remembering their childhood days.

Rawls drives John and Owen to the airport in the morning. He waits with them for their flights, since he has nothing else to do. John tells Owen, “We have plenty of time.” When only half an hour is left until John’s flight takes off, Owen begins to think his dream might not come true after all. Just then, passengers begin disembarking a plane—nuns escorting Vietnamese children. Catholic Relief Services frequently helped relocate war orphans.

One of the nuns asks Owen to help take the boys to the bathroom. He says he’d be happy to help, and John shows them to the temporary men’s room. The anxious children stop crying, captivated by the sight of a soldier nearly their size. They pass Dick Jarvits on the way to the restroom. The children use the unfamiliar bathroom, chattering to themselves. John suddenly remembers Owen describing the Vietnamese-speaking children from his dream. Owen already knows what’s about to happen.

Dick kicks in the door, holding a grenade. A boy screams and the others begin to cry. Owen speaks to them in Vietnamese: “DOONG SA…DON’T BE AFRAID.” Hearing their own language—in the voice of a child like them—makes the children trust Owen. He tells them to lie down. He tells John they have four seconds. Dick throws the grenade at John, who catches it and passes it to Owen. Owen jumps into his hands, and John lifts him lightly.

A nun who was waiting outside the bathroom ran to get Rawls, who caught Dick running away from the men’s room. Dick draws his bayonet, but Rawls grabs Dick’s machete and breaks Dick’s neck with it. Meanwhile, Owen soars toward the high window. He stuffs the grenade into the windowsill and holds it in place to make sure it won’t roll back down into the room. He ducks his head beneath the windowsill before the explosion.

The cement window ledge protects John and the children from the grenade fragments. Only their eardrums are hurt. Owen lands in the big industrial sink. A nun lifts him out of the sink while another kneels on the floor. Together they rest his body in their laps. The children surround them, crying, but Owen reminds them not to be afraid. His arms are amputated below his elbows. He tries to reach out to John, then realizes he has no arms. “REMEMBER WATAHANTOWET?” he asks calmly.

Owen tells the nun, “WHOSOEVER LIVETH AND BELIEVETH IN ME SHALL NEVER DIE.” Then he seems troubled, saying, “I’M AWFULLY COLD…CAN’T YOU DO SOMETHING?” Then Owen smiles again, and looks only at John. “YOU’RE GETTING SMALLER, BUT I CAN STILL SEE YOU!” Those are his last words.

“I am always saying prayers for Owen Meany,” John says. He thinks about how he would have answered Mary Beth in the cemetery, if he hadn’t been speechless with grief. When they held Owen so lightly above their heads as children, they didn’t know that there were other forces at work, forces they didn’t have the faith to sense, that were raising Owen up, out of their reach. “O God—please give him back! I shall keep asking You.”