Voice In A Prayer For Owen Meany

In John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, Owen Meany’s unusual voice at first seems to be nothing more than a minor idiosyncrasy but ultimately plays a significant role in his fate. In the beginning, Owen’s voice is little more than a symbol of his strangeness, another aspect of himself that separates him from his peers. The narrator introduces it as “a voice not entirely of this world” (5), and Irving writes all his dialogue in capital letters. Some people, like John, are accustomed to Owen’s voice that it doesn’t bother them; but when Owen visits John’s grandmother’s house, Harriet Wheelwright describes his voice as one which could bring dead mice back to life. When Owen first meets John’s cousins, they are so alarmed by his appearance and the sound of his voice that they (perhaps unwittingly) comply with whatever he wants them all to do, despite their usual abrasiveness. Certain characters conjecture that Owen’s voice is supernatural in origin; when John tells his grandmother’s maid that Owen thinks his voice comes from God, she replies, “I think his voice comes from the Devil” (191). Though she is incorrect on this, the idea that Owen’s voice

Many students and teachers love “The Voice” and some hate him, but no one is able to ignore him. Here, the reader discovers the reason why Owen’s dialogue is always capitalized: he wrote all his columns, and all his school papers and letters, in capital letters, “BECAUSE IT WILL INSTANTLY GRAB THE READER’S ATTENTION” (289) -- a comment that seems to come as much from the author as it comes from Owen. Later, when John and Owen try to discover the identity of John’s father, they meet a voice teacher who tells them that Owen’s voice would never change in puberty, and that he was stuck with a “permanent scream”