A Prayer For Owen Meany Fate Analysis

One of the great questions that people have argued about since the beginning of time is fate vs freewill. It is a question that will never have a correct answer. Philosophers have gone back and forth about this debate for thousands of years but both sides have stayed even. It is one of the ultimate questions, so John Irving gave the world his opinion with one of his most famous books. In John Irving's, A Prayer for Owen Meany, he shows many things that he believes in throughout the book. One of the most important of these is his thoughts on fate and destiny. He shows that he believes that people are all put on earth with a certain purpose. John Irving shows his belief in fate throughout A Prayer for Owen Meany as displayed by “the shot.” John

Jonny would toss the ball to Owen and lift him up. It was easy for Owen to be lifted because he was so light. Owen would then dunk the ball through the rim of the hoop. It does not particularly seem logical, that two unathletic boys, who did not have any love for basketball, would spend hours and hours mastering “the shot”. The boys enjoyed “the shot,” but their main goal was to perfect it and be able to do it in two seconds. They were more focused on the time they achieved as opposed to the enjoyment it brought them. The accomplishment of being able to complete the shot in 2 seconds is what sets Owen up to save the children. When a grenade is thrown in the closet by DIck Jarvis, Owen is ready, and knows that “the shot” will save the kids. Jonny then lifts him up to the window sill. Owen pins the grenade against the ledge so the bomb detonates on him instead of the Vietnamese children. All of the hours spent practicing “the shot “ prepared Owen and Johnny for saving of the children. Once they cut the time of the shot down to three seconds, Owen was happy. As it turned out, that is how long he has before the bomb explodes. When it was at four seconds, he believed they could cut it down to three seconds just to be sure they had time to do the shot correctly. Owen’s entire life seemed to be a build up to his overall fate, which

“There was an old janitor who worked the weekends and who knew us from the regular school-year; he got us the best basketballs and clean towels out of the stock room, and sometimes he even let us swim in the indoor pool-I think he was a trifle retarded. He must have been damaged in some fashion because he actually enjoyed watching Owen and me practice our idiotic stunt with the basketball-the leaping, lift-him-up, slam-dunk