by Philip Page

In the Western tradition of hermeneutics, two ways of knowing have often been contrasted. One, usually considered inferior, is a process - earthbound and empirical - which moves logically from step to step, and is communicable, repeatable and transferable. The conclusions reached by this method always remain hypotheses and thus are subject to dispute and revision. The second - presumed superior - form of knowing is an upward leap that relies on unpredictable flashes of insight. Such knowing requires not merely reason and logic but all of our human - often some superhuman - faculties, and as a result tends to be noncommunicable and nonreplicable.

In The Republic, for example, Plato distinguishes thinking (dianoia) from intelligence (noesis): with the former the mind "is compelled to pursue its inquiry by starting from assumptions and travelling, not up to a principle, but down to a conclusion," whereas with the latter "the mind moves in the other direction, from an assumption up towards a principle which is not hypothetical" (6.509). Plato's distinctions are analogous to Milton's "Discursive" and "Intuitive" reason, the former most often used by humans and the latter most often by angels (Paradise Lost 5.486-90).

Similarly, William James distinguishes between "naturalism" and "supernaturalism" (384), between nonreligious and religious experience. In analyzing Martin Luther's faith, James differentiates between the "intellectual" part and the "far more vital" part, "something not intellectual but immediate and intuitive" (200). He associates this second mode with the "affective experience," the "saintly character," and the "mystical state" (201,219, 335). For James, the religious way of knowing is characterized by its transforming effect, by its inclusion of a broader range of experience than is encompassed by the nonreligious or "rationalistic consciousness" (335), and by its lack of transferability to another human: "Feeling is private and dumb" (341).

More recently, Paul Ricoeur explores the difference between explanation (explication, Erklarung) and understanding (comprehension, Verstandnis). Borrowed from the natural sciences, the former is "methodic" ("Explanation" 165) and proceeds in piecemeal fashion: "in explanation we ex-plicate or unfold the range of propositions and meanings"; explanation consists of "external facts to observe, hypotheses to be submitted to empirical verification, general laws for covering such facts, theories to encompass the scattered laws in a systematic whole, and subordination of empirical generalizations to hypothetic-deductive procedures" (Interpretation 72). In contrast, understanding is "the nonmethodic moment" ("Explanation" 165) in which one holistically discovers meaning: "in understanding we comprehend or grasp as a whole the chain of partial meaning in one act of synthesis"; rather than focusing on external facts, it requires "the transference of ourselves into another's psychic life" (Interpretation 72, 73).

For Ricoeur, the two forms of knowing are neither hierarchical nor mutually exclusive, but form a "highly mediated dialectic" (Interpretation 74). The inquiry into a given text proceeds through a "hermeneutical arc" ("Text" 60): from a preliminary, naive understanding (a "guess"), through an analytic explanation, to a more sophisticated comprehensive understanding (Interpretation 87, 74-79). Ricoeur defines this experience of "follow[ing] the path of thought opened by the text" as interpretation (interpretation, Deutung), which, by completing the hermeneutical circle, "culminates in the self-interpretation of a subject who thenceforth understands himself better, understands himself differently, or simply begins to understand himself" ("Text" 61, 57).

In A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), John Irving plays with this hermeneutical dialectic. He sets up an apparent dichotomy between the two traditional ways of knowing, but simultaneously he parodies each approach, unravels the distinction between them, and half-mockingly offers common sense as a third alternative.

Readers are probably most familiar with Irving's earlier novel, The World According to Garp (1976), which recounts the comic/tragic life of T. S. Garp, as he attempts to write fiction, protect his family, and come to grips with his own sexuality in the midst of the women's liberation movement. Irving's next two novels, The Hotel New Hampshire (1982) and The Cider-House Rules (1985), recall Garp in their depictions of the profound humor and simultaneous pathos of human life, and in Rules Irving broadens his vision by addressing the issues of abortion and adoption.

A Prayer for Owen Meany is the Bildungsroman of John Wheelwright, an expatriate bachelor and English teacher living in Toronto, who retrospectively narrates the effects on his life of his boyhood friend, Owen Meany. The lives of the two boys become entwined when Owen hits a line drive that kills Johnny's mother and when they try to discover the identity of Johnny's real father. During their boyhood in the New England town of Gravesend, the passive and laconic Johnny is fascinated by the remarkable Owen. Owen leads not only Johnny but all the students at their private school, the Gravesend Academy, by his supreme self-confidence and by his commanding and almost unearthly voice (rendered throughout in capital letters). Through a series of visions and dreams, Owen acquires the belief that he has a divine mission which requires him to die on 7 July 1968, in a tropical setting. Owen also takes charge of Johnny's life, helping him through school, directing him toward a career as an English teacher, and amputating his finger to keep him out of the Vietnam War. The plot culminates with Owen's death in a Phoenix airport when he sacrifices himself to save a group of Vietnamese children and nuns. Owen's commanding presence, his apparent prophetic powers and his martyrdom convince John that his friend was literally the "Second Coming."

In A Prayer for Owen Meany, the characters, most prominently Johnny and Owen, are confronted with a rich array of signs - objects, events, texts, other characters - which they have difficulty interpreting. From the perspective of semiotics, such difficulty is not surprising. In the early 20th century, for example, Charles S. Peirce argued that there is no simple relationship between a sign and its meaning but instead an infinite regression of signs. Each sign produces in the interpreter something new, what Peirce calls the interpretant, but in turn each interpretant must be named by another sign which has another interpretant, and so on indefinitely (1:339). More recently, Jonathan Culler has argued that the traditional distinction between signifier and signified cannot be maintained. Instead of that opposition, there are, always already, both "the differences responsible for meaning" and the systems of concepts and signs "which enable an act to signify." For Culler, semiotics reveals the fundamental contradictions of any mode of inquiry or analysis: "The alternative, then, is not a discussion, not another mode of analysis, but acts of writing, acts of displacement, play which violates language and rationality" (40-42).

A Prayer for Owen Meany similarly overwhelms readers with a plethora of signs, and calls particular attention to readers' presuppositions about interpreting them. Indirectly, the text foregrounds this issue by the multitude of interpretative acts undertaken by the characters. More directly, Irving's text draws attention to the act of interpretation through its mode of narration. As John retells his life, he unavoidably interprets past events, and this situation forces the reader to consider not only the events but also the way they may be re-constructed through the process of narration. To accentuate this pattern, John habitually addresses the reader, most noticeably in his refrains of "Remember that?" and "as you shall see," which in their shrill insistence force the reader to participate and interpret. Moreover, in its presentation of signs and their interpretations by characters and readers, the novel appears to offer two fundamentally different ways of interpreting, ways which closely resemble Ricoeur's "explanation" and "understanding."

Many characters are said to be avid explainers: Harriet Wheelwright (Johnny's grandmother) tries to interpret everyone in Gravesend and everything on television; Dan Needham (Johnny's step-father) explains why Owen gives his prized set of baseball cards to Johnny; the neighbor Mr. Fish tries to interpret the school's Christmas pageant; and the Wheelwright's maid Germaine sees every event or act as a sign of some deeper spiritual presence. More significantly, much of the plot revolves around the identity of Johnny's biological father, and Johnny and Owen (led by Owen) conduct an elaborate detective-like investigation of the issue, explaining the few relevant clues and following up their thin leads in a step-by-step manner. For example, as methodical and reasonable investigators, they infer that, since Johnny's mother (Tabitha) met his step-father on the train from Boston, she may also have met Johnny's biological father there. Since that clue is nearly impossible to pursue, they also infer that she may have met the biological father during her mysterious weekly trips to Boston, which sends them on a wild goose chase to the bar where Tabitha used to sing.

This extensive range of metaphors for Owen establishes him as the primary sign to be explained, by the other characters and by the reader. The array of metaphors, however, suggests the impossibility of any consistent explanation of Owen and, by extension, of the novel: if he can be Christ or Antichrist, fox or water bug, holy man or gnome, what is he? And if his essence is unclear, he must be forever analyzed, must be forever part of Peirce's infinite regression of signs and interpretants.

Even more noticeably than characters, objects and events are repeatedly subjected to explanation. One such object is the drawing of an apparently armless man which had served as the signature of the local 17th-century Indian chief, Watahantowet, on the documents ceding the Gravesend area to the original white settlers. This totem of the armless man is the ur-instance of the armless, fingerless, clawless motif that pervades the novel. Just as Watahantowet's totem is a mysterious and highly disputed sign, so Owen's totem - his baseball card collection - is open for inquiry, especially when it appears to reveal his feelings about the death of Johnny's mother. His collection, his most prized possession, inspires interpretative awe in the other kids: "the cards were alphabetized, or ordered under another system - all the infielders together, maybe. We didn't know what the system was, but obviously Owen had a system" (15). Owen's giving of his collection to Johnny must then be explained, along with Johnny's answering gift of his most prized possession, a stuffed armadillo, and then the cycle continues when Owen returns the armadillo - without its claws - to Johnny. Similar fates await other rich signs, such as Tabitha's dressmaker's dummy which Owen mistakes for the ghost of Tabitha herself, the Volkswagen of the absurd psychologist, Dr. Dolder, which Owen arranges to be placed on the school's auditorium stage, the statue of Mary Magdalene whose arms Owen removes, and the fatal baseball which becomes the central clue in the hunt for Johnny's real father.

Owen is not only the prime character to be explained (in Peirce's terms, the prime interpretant) but also the prime investigator. For example, when, detective-like, he and Johnny inspect the empty dormitory rooms at Gravesend Academy, Owen creates each boy's personality from the clues left in the room. His method is thorough and orderly: he examines every item, always completes his investigation by lying on the absent boy's bed, and then draws his conclusions.

In addition to characters and objects, various texts in the novel are subjected to investigation. As the grown-up narrator, John bases much of his explanation of Owen on the latter's diary, an embedded text in which Owen had attempted to explain the events in his life. Many of Owen's and John's conclusions about Owen's mission in life focus on another text - the inscription of the date of his death which he claims to see on the tombstone in the community production of A Christmas Carol. Owen is always the primary explainer, not only of the tombstone but of other texts such as Christmas carols and an Army field manual.

The novel also alludes to and often includes comments on other literary texts, chiefly The Great Gatsby and the novels of Thomas Hardy. The references to Fitzgerald's novel suggest parallels between Nick Carroway - the bystander who narrates the story of his idol, Jay Gatsby - and John's relationship to his idol, Owen Meany. The several allusions to Hardy imply that his determinism is comparable to both Owen's emerging conviction that his life is fated and John's necessity to believe in the miraculousness of Owen's life and its effect on his own life. In turn, references to contemporary literature, movies, television and popular music relate the question of interpretation to American culture, and within this context to the effect of the Vietnam war on America and, as Sean French asserts (35), about America's loss of innocence after that war. John reaches maturity during that crisis, and his inability to come to grips with it and therefore with America contribute greatly to his bitterness.

Such issues cannot be investigated through the methodical process of explanation, but require the other traditional way of discovering meaning - in Ricoeur's terminology, understanding, and in the novel's terms, faith. When one understands, it is intuitive and holistic. Either one has faith - that is, one believes without question - or one does not. The experience is unutterable and unsharable: as Owen says, "THE REAL MIRACLES AREN'T ANYTHING YOU CAN SEE - THEY'RE THINGS YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE WITHOUT SEEING" (277). One of John's reasons for believing in Owen's divinity is his sense of the dead Owen's presence in his life, in particular on the occasion when he felt that Owen had kept him from falling down a stairway. Yet when John tries to convince his stepfather of Owen's intervention, Dan does not deny his account of his sensations but replies, "But you can't expect me to believe that Owen Meany's actual hand kept you from falling down those cellar stairs; you can't expect me to be convinced that Owen Meany's actual voice 'spoke' to you in the secret passageway" (458).

Although at first glance Irving seems to suggest that explanation and faith/understanding are distinct ways of knowing, a closer look reveals that he does not neatly distinguish the two modes, but like Ricoeur sees them as a "highly mediated dialectic." For example, although Johnny and Owen seem to follow a discursive and presumably rational exploration of signs in their attempts to solve the riddle of his biological father, an element of faith plays a crucial role in that investigation. When Johnny looks over the audience during a performance of A Christmas Carol, he senses a resemblance between this audience and the crowd at the fatal baseball game; and in doing so, he feels that his father must have been the person at the game to whom Tabitha was waving when she was hit by Owen's batted ball and therefore that he will be able to recognize his father in the audience at the play (215-18). Even though Johnny does not find his father at this point, his leap to the idea that his father must have been the person to whom Tabitha was waving becomes a significant factor in his and Owen's investigation. What is necessary for his sudden sensation is the internal intuition of faith rather than the external process of explanation, as Owen's response to Johnny's theory confirms: "As for my 'imagining' that my mother had been waving to my actual father in the last seconds she was alive, Owen Meany believed in trusting such instincts; he said that I must be ON THE RIGHT TRACK, because the idea gave him THE SHIVERS - a sure sign" (229). Similarly, during Owen's otherwise empirical investigation of the Academy boys' empty rooms in the school dormitory - in which he is "so systematic in his methods of search, so deliberate about putting everything back exactly where it had been" - nevertheless "His behavior in the rooms was remindful of a holy man's search of a cathedral of antiquity - as if he could divine some ancient and also holy intention there" (146).

As these examples suggest, in Irving's novel the two ways of knowing become indistinguishable: "imagining" blends with investigating, feelings are as essential as thought, external "facts" merge with internal projections, the hermeneutical circle is completed. One "knows" because one believes, because one experiences an uncontrollable, unsharable physiological response, such as the shivers, which is a recurrent indication of this blending of the two modes.

The local sagamore's name was Watahantowet; instead of his signature, he made his mark upon the deed in the form of his totem - an armless man. Later, there was some dispute - not very interesting - regarding the Indian deed, and more interesting speculation regarding why Watahantowet's totem was an armless man. Some said it was how it made the sagamore feel to give up all that land - to have his arms cut off - and others pointed out that earlier "marks" made by Watahantowet revealed that the figure, although armless, held a feather in his mouth; this was said to indicate the sagamore's frustration at being unable to write. But in several other versions of the totem ascribed to Watahantowet, the figure has a tomahawk in its mouth and looks completely crazy - or else, he is making a gesture toward peace: no arms, tomahawk in mouth; together, perhaps, they are meant to signify that Watahantowet does not fight. (19)

First, there is a sign, a written mark, a totem. That particular sign is then "open to interpretation and dispute" (454), regarding the nature of the signifier and the signified, as well as the motives behind the sign and its investigation. Yet neither the signifier nor the signified can be pinned down: in endless Peircean fashion more signs proliferate (armless/unarmed, feather/tomahawk) as rapidly as do the explanations of those signs. The supposed original sign and any systematic attempt at explaining it thus unravel. As Wendy Steiner has noted, there are numerous parallels between this novel and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, of which the most significant is the proliferation of signs and attempted explanations. Watahantowet's mark functions like the scarlet letter A. Like the Chief's mark, more and more A's (may) appear - in the sky, on Dimmesdale's chest, on the narrator's brain - and their explanations multiply throughout the book and in the voluminous criticism on it. Both Watahantowet's sign and the letter A exemplify Culler's assertion of the breakdown between signifier and signified.

In A Prayer, the explanatory mode is undercut in countless additional ways. It is parodied in Germaine, who sees all things as signs of supernatural influence over human lives; for example, "Owen himself was taken as a 'sign' by poor Germaine; his diminutive size suggested to her that Owen was small enough to actually enter the body and soul of another person - and cause that person to perform unnatural acts" (174). Explanation is reduced to the farcical when Owen's girlfriend Hester vomits on New Year's Eve and he sees it as a sign of the bad year to come (408) and when Hester interprets one of the fireworks as looking "like sperm" (508). More seriously, the elaborate process of explaining the clues about Johnny's father is undercut when the investigation culminates in the anti-climax of Johnny's discovery that the Reverend Merrill is his biological father. Instead of feeling relief and joy at finally finding his father, Johnny feels only scorn for Mr. Merrill, largely because the latter's religious beliefs seem superficial to him.

Yet, just as explanation as a way of knowing is both present and undercut, so is faith/understanding. Faith is mocked when John reports that no hailstones strike Owen during the hailstorm at Dan and Tabitha's wedding (118). Nor can faith be taken seriously when the details of the Holy Nativity become the ingredients for comic debunking, as in the episode in which the rector and his wife Barb wrangle with Owen about the school's Christmas pageant:

"[THE TURTLEDOVES] LOOK LIKE THEY'RE FROM OUTER SPACE," Owen said. "NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO BE."

"They're doves!" Barb Wiggin said. "Everyone knows what doves are!"

The debunking of faith is perhaps most evident in the treatment of the town's two ministers, Reverend Wiggin and Reverend Merrill. For the former, faith is a constant battle, to be verified not by contentment or inner harmony but by how vigorously one lives and prays: "And he loved all allusions to faith as a battle to be savagely fought and won; faith was a war waged against faith's adversaries." More interesting is Reverend Merrill, whose "faith" is initially based not on belief but on doubt: "he reassured us that doubt was the essence of faith, and not faith's opposite" (107). In the old logic of binary opposites, this makes no sense. Faith cannot be based on doubt unless they are not opposites, unless their apparent difference is undermined; so Irving proceeds to unravel the distinction as he twists and retwists this faith/doubt paradox.

In addition to blurring the distinction between explanation and understanding, and besides calling into question both ways of knowing, Irving offers a third alternative which further depolarizes the opposition. When confronted with a perplexing sign or with the need to understand or believe, some characters refuse either approach but instead simply accept the phenomenon as a given, a non-sign, a bare thing without meaning or implication. Owen's girlfriend Hester is the primary exemplar of this commonsense approach. Refusing to find any explanations for what she encounters and being without any faith, she accepts life at face value and argues passionately with Owen for the way that he takes life seriously and symbolically. Before Owen's death, Johnny often adopts a similar position. For example, whereas Owen finds each boy's room in the dormitory a treasure trove of interpretable signs, Johnny is skeptical: "They're just things.... What can we tell about the guy who lives here. really?" (146). Even Owen sometimes demonstrates this literalism, for example when he insists on removing the crib from the creche in the nativity scene for the Christmas pageant because of the line, "No crib for his bed," in the carol "Away in a Manger" (154-55). This third way of knowing recalls Flask in Melville's Moby-Dick, who looks at the otherwise richly interpreted doubloon and "see[s] nothing here, nothing but a round thing made of gold" (361). Things are just things, not signs, neither open to explanation nor available as vehicles for understanding.

Geertz argues that common sense has usually been considered unquestionable, as encompassing that which every sane person in every culture would accept: that is, as common truths not requiring explanation. As he sees it, however, common sense is equally a cultural system, "as much an interpretation of the immediacies of experience, a gloss on them, as are myth, painting, epistemology, or whatever... [and] can be questioned, disputed, affirmed, developed, formalized, contemplated, even taught..." (76). Therefore he places common sense between the core and the rest of the suburbs, "as one of the oldest suburbs of human culture - not very regular, not very uniform, but moving beyond the maze of little streets and squares toward some less casual shape" (77).

Geertz's analysis suggests that such categories as common sense and culturally specific disciplines are not as distinct as one might presuppose, and in A Prayer for Owen Meany, Irving suggests the same with respect to explanation versus faith, discursive versus intuitive reasoning, nonreligious versus religious experience. Instead of adhering to any bipolar opposition, Irving devalues each extreme, documenting the danger of relying too heavily on either term of each opposition. By doing so, he thus aligns himself with mainstream poststructuralist thought and specifically with Ricoeur's insistence on the whole interpretative process, the "highly mediated dialectic" between explanation and understanding.

In Irving's novel, the deconstruction of the two traditional ways of knowing is one manifestation of a broader pattern of the posing and then merging of apparent bipolar oppositions. Another manifestation of this pattern involves gender. In The World According to Garp, both strident maleness and strident femaleness fail miserably: the sexual aggression of assorted males, the radical responses to that aggression by many females, and Garp's own gender-related intensity manifest this theme. As Carol C. Harter and James R. Thompson assert, Garp moves toward the integration of the masculine and the feminine in a more mature self (83, 102). By the end of the novel, sexual extremism has been devalued and deflated, replaced by a valued group of androgynous or sexually benign characters - Roberta Muldoon, Ellen James, Duncan Garp and young Jenny Garp.

Gender terms also define John Wheelwright's failure to mature. His failure is connected to his frustrated search for his biological father as well as for historical "founding fathers," for political father figures (Presidents Kennedy and Reagan) and for God the father. Finding none of these, he substitutes Owen, but he pays heavily for this displacement, and the price includes his self-exile to Canada and his incurable immaturity. His failure is also connected to his refusal to engage in sexual intercourse and, more dramatically, to his emasculation when Owen amputates Johnny's finger and the latter passively accepts his symbolic castration. Unable to find a true father, he is cut off from fatherhood, thus completing his alienation from society. He is symbolically genderless, lost in a self-defeating confusion of identity. The sexually benign characters in Garp, as well as Owen. gain spiritual strength from their androgyny, but for John the loss of the male/female gender dichotomy leads to the abdication of adulthood and to impotent stagnation.

Steiner asserts that at the end of Garp Roberta finds a viable middle position between unchecked gender aggression and emasculation, and the other androgynous characters at the end of Garp, as well as Owen, also find this middle position. Owen personifies Irving's validation of androgyny and benign sexuality: he is powerful yet unthreatening, he is sexually active and yet self-sacrificing, and he is genitally well-endowed yet doll-like. His physical appeal transcends gender - no one can resist touching him. He triumphs by losing his arms and thus symbolically by rejecting the destructive armaments of other men and the country. In complete contrast to John, Owen does reconcile gender dichotomies.

Similarly, Irving teases readers with uncertainties about the reliability of John's narration. Like many first-person narrators, he is not always present at the scenes he describes and hence resorts to speculation about what must have happened; without direct access to the other characters' minds he imagines what they must have thought. More unsettling are his occasional confessions of possible inaccuracies in his account, as for example when he wonders: "In addition to not knowing who my father was, what else didn't I know?" (313), or when he admits that he was drunk when he thought that the dead Owen saved him from falling down the stairs (458), and when he wonders if events are the way he remembers them because "Perhaps Owen had even changed my memory" (503).

Despite this clue and the ironic distancing between John Irving and John Wheelwright, several reviewers seem to conflate them. Patrick Parrinder criticizes John Wheelwright's misanthropic attitudes and sophomoric immaturity as if they reflected the author's position (13); William Pritchard claims that there is no irony in the narration (36); and Steiner, asserting that the "narrator is quite obviously Irving's shadow," finds his reminiscences "unspeakably tedious." John Wheelwright is ambiguously similar to John Irving, but he is distinct from the author, not a reflection of him. The grown-up John Wheelwright, having failed to mature beyond his youthful adoration of Owen, is tedious, sententious and obsessive, and/but he has unshakable faith in Owen's divinity. Irving thus problematizes the relationships between author and character/narrator, raises necessary but unresolvable questions about the validity of claims of intuitive understanding and thereby questions faith at the same time as he affirms it.

Irving's strategy of offering ambiguously multi,pie signs and interpretations is encapsulized with the novel's title itself. On one hand the book is a prayer for Owen, which recalls the poignant scene in which Owen begs Reverend Merrill to offer such a prayer, but on the other hand, it is John who is the "pray-er," and Owen is the object of his supplications. Similarly, Owen Meany's name reverberates with various significations. Do we, the narrator, and/or the other characters "owe" something to Owen? Do we owe him some kind of "meaning"? Or do any of us "own" Owen or his meaning, and/or does Owen himself owe or own any meaning? Furthermore, is Owen a "meany," suggestive not of meaning but of meanness, and is there something mean about withholding meaning? Or is it John who is mean-spirited, narrow and unforgiving? As with the rest of the novel, the questions proliferate and the attempt to formulate answers is undercut: no single interpretation suffices, no simple oppositions remain.

Whereas John abjectly fails to achieve such fruition, Owen clearly does. At first one might argue that Owen represents the danger of over-reliance on faith, since his faith in fulfilling his destiny and serving God lead to his early death. This is close to Hester's view, biased as she is toward keeping him alive. Yet Owen does achieve Ricoeur's third phase of enlightened understanding. He moves beyond initial guessing at meanings, works through a long period of empirical explanation, and then demonstrates his acquisition of an integrated self through his composure, his self-confidence, his eager acceptance of his responsibilities once that destiny becomes clear to him, and his sense of what William James calls an "ecstasy of happiness" (206) as he completes that destiny.

John Irving and John Wheelwright shape the narrative so that it culminates in the lengthy account of Owen's heroic death in a temporary restroom in the Phoenix airport (511-43). The climax occurs when Johnny lifts Owen to the windowsill, a reiteration of "the shot" which the two boys had practiced endlessly on a basketball court, so that Owen can smother Dick Jarvits's grenade, thus saving the Vietnamese children, the nuns and Johnny, but killing himself. In that account, all the novel's motifs come together, such as Owen's commanding voice and leadership, armlessness, the debilitating effects of the Vietnam War on America, and Owen's possible divinity. On the one hand, the account reflects John's overblown sentimentality for Owen and his clearly biased claims of Owen's divinity and foreknowledge of events. On the other hand, the account, especially of Owen's death and subsequent ascent, will inspire even the most skeptical:

Like Ricoeur, Irving seems to validate the "highly mediated dialectic" between "explanation" and "understanding" and to discredit reliance on any single, fixed approach. Yet, whereas Owen's apparent fulfillment underscores the power of this mediation, John Wheelwright's sterile rigidity calls it into question. Irving not only problematizes any reliance on any single position, but he further creates doubts about the efficacy of Ricoeur's dialectic. By offering and simultaneously questioning supposedly contrasting ways of knowing, and similarly by debunking traditional polarities between genders and conventional presuppositions about narratives, Irving's parodic approach implies that no single position is sufficient, that even the dialectic embrace of both positions is suspect, and that instead we must rely on the play between and among a confusing but wondrous array of possibilities.

WORKS CITED

Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

French, Sean. "Pleasures of Plot." Review of A Prayer for Owen Meany. New Statesman and Society 12 May 1989: 35-36.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Ed. Larzer Ziff. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1962.

Irving, John. A Prayer for Owen Meany. New York: Morrow, 1989.

James, William. The Works o.f William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: Norton, 1967.

Parrinder, Patrick. "Austward Ho." Review of A Prayer for Owen Meany. London Review of Books 18 May 1989: 12-13.

Peirce, Charles S. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. 8 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1931-60.

Plato. The Republic of Plato. Trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford. New York: Oxford UP, 1945.

Pritchard, William. "Small-town Saint." Review of A Prayer for Owen Meany. The New Republic 22 May 1989: 36-38.

Ricoeur, Paul. "Explanation and Understanding." The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work. Ed. Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart. Boston: Beacon, 1976. 149-66.

-----. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Theory of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1976.

Steiner, Wendy. "The American Wholegrain." Review of A Prayer for Owen Meany. Times Literary Supplement 19 May 1989: 535.