A Prayer for Owen Meany: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

Harriet always hated a lack of effort, which is ironic because she never worked in her life, never told Tabitha to work, and never gave John any chores. She thought watching television demanded too little effort. But after she sees a TV in an old folks’ home, she begins to crave one, even as she denounces them for hastening the deaths of the elderly. She finally gets a TV after Tabitha and then Lydia die. Without Lydia to take care of, Germaine soon resigns.

John and Owen didn’t know what would be on TV—they were only familiar with the films shown in town, mostly Tarzan movies or biblical epics. Owen found the biblical epics “SACRILEGIOUS.” When the TV comes, Harriet watches it all day long, but her passion is born from contempt—commenting on the trashy shows on TV gives her endless energy and purpose.

Harriet and Owen both appreciate one show, at least—The Liberace Show, featuring the flamboyant piano prodigy Liberace. John cannot understand their love for such a kitschy performer, whose attention to his costumes surpassed his attention to his music. Liberace is rumored to be gay, but he fiercely denies the rumors and successfully sues a newspaper for libel, much to Owen and Harriet’s delight.

John complains to Dan about feeling left out of this ridiculous phenomenon. Dan is a good listener, patient and devoted to children. He may not have initially planned to teach at Gravesend Academy until his retirement, but losing Tabitha led him to dedicate himself to the education of “the whole boy,” which is what Gravesend Academy sought to promote in its pupils. Unlike many of his fellow faculty members, he actually believes that it’s harder to be a teenager than an adult, and is sympathetic to the problems of the adolescents in his care. He also believes it’s hard to be elderly. He tells John to have more empathy for Harriet, who has suffered many losses.

John still thinks it’s absurd for Owen, who thinks he’s so smart, to adore Liberace, but Dan reminds him that Owen is not worldly—he has never even left Gravesend. Dan dismisses a lot of Owen’s eccentricities to his stilted and superstitious upbringing, but John thinks this is too simplistic a theory. He thinks Dan is too simplistic in his thinking about the Academy too—Dan thinks the Academy can save any boy, and Owen just has to make it there to be rid of his family’s superstitions.

Martha and Alfred Eastman also believe in the saving graces of a private education, and they have high hopes that sending Noah and Simon to Gravesend Academy will save them from the dangers of growing up in rural, uncivilized society—mainly driving drunk and having unprotected sex out of sheer boredom. Noah and Simon have wild natures, and they need the heavy workload and strict, numbing routine of Gravesend Academy to wear them down. They are less worried about civilizing Hester.

While the boys all prepare to go to the academy, Hester has only the public high school to look forward to. She becomes angry that her parents won’t give her the same educational opportunities—or the same chance to be saved—as her brothers.

Owen and Harriet bond over their love for Liberace and their disdain for everything else, and Harriet becomes a champion for Owen’s studies at the academy. When Owen protests that his parents can’t afford the kind of clothes boys have to wear to the academy, Harriet promises to take him shopping. Owen has no problem earning admission and a full scholarship with his stellar grades, but John has to repeat a year of school before the academy will admit him. Owen could have skipped a grade, but instead he faithfully decides to stay behind with John and help him with his homework—as he promised Tabitha he would. “I’LL NEVER LEAVE YOU,” he tells John.

Back in the present, Liberace has just died at age sixty-seven, allegedly of AIDS. He reversed his former public opposition to homosexuality before he died, but never admitted to being gay.

Over Thanksgiving in 1954, the Eastmans come to Gravesend and see Harriet’s television. Simon likes everything, and Hester hates everything. Noah is in his first year at the academy, and is feeling overwhelmed by the demands of his classes. The Eastmans decide to take a relaxing Caribbean vacation over Christmas, leaving Owen disappointed by yet another lost opportunity to see Sawyer Depot.

Owen has become disenchanted with Christmas pageantry, and religious pageantry in general, after the disastrous pageant of the year before. He denounces the Catholic adoration of “OBJECTS” that manifests in biblical films and in representations like statues. He especially hates the statue of Mary Magdalene erected near the playground of St. Michael’s parochial school, the school Owen would have attended if his parents had not switched religions. Mary Magdalene, posed in a stone archway, makes a tempting target for balls and pucks, but the nuns living nearby keep an eye out for troublemakers.

Owen is afraid of nuns. Ironically for such an unusual boy, he thinks they are “UNNATURAL”—but he and John can’t resist throwing chestnuts at the statue every fall, or covering its feet with tadpoles in the spring. The nuns give chase if they see them, but Owen and John can outrun the “penguins.” In the spring of 1957, Owen is especially keen on vandalizing the statue. He and John had seen the movie The Ten Commandments just before Easter, which Owen found to be a terrible time for such a release—showing the story of Moses during the time dedicated to Jesus. Moreover, he hated seeing the parting of the Red Sea on screen: “YOU CAN’T TAKE A MIRACLE AND JUST SHOW IT.”

Owen and John continue trying to solve the mystery of John’s father by watching the crowds at Dan’s shows and searching their memories for who was at the baseball game. They decide that Mrs. Merrill never would have gone to a game, not being a fan of baseball, and Rev. Merrill wouldn’t have gone without his wife. They agree that they would have remembered the Wiggins making a spectacle of themselves if they had been there. Owen cautions John not to forget the likelihood that if his mother had thought his father would be a good influence, she wouldn’t have kept his identity secret. He should be prepared for disappointment.

By the Christmas of 1957, both Noah and Simon are juniors at the academy—Noah having been held back a year. At Sawyer Depot High School, Hester skipped a grade to end up in the same graduating year as her brothers. John is disappointed not to see more of Hester, whom he has un-cousinly feelings for. Owen tells him that Hester is probably too dangerous for him, but she would probably consider going out with him to drive her family crazy.

Hester is determined to scandalize her family to punish them for denying her the same freedoms and opportunities as her brothers. In 1957, the Eastmans stay home for Christmas instead of returning to the Caribbean after Hester became involved with a native boatman the previous year. They still don’t invite John and Owen to Sawyer Depot, to the boys’ regret. They’re both fifteen, and slightly in love with Hester.

Back in the present year, it’s Palm Sunday. John always finds the week before Easter to be exhausting—he worries that Jesus couldn’t possibly have come back to life after all that he suffered before his death. Christmas is a much easier story to swallow, being more believable and more upbeat than the saga of Jesus’s death and rebirth. But the Resurrection is the central miracle to Christianity, and faith in it is necessary to be a Christian.

After the Palm Sunday service, John heads to the dining hall of The Bishop Strachan School, where he teaches. He reflects on the clothes that the boarders—all girls—are wearing on the weekend. He thinks that the girls dress badly when they aren’t wearing their uniforms; he thinks they must prefer not having to worry about what to wear most of the time. He wonders if they dress with him in mind on Sundays, since he is frequently the only man who comes to the boarders’ lunch on Sundays.

Rev. Katherine Keeling, the headmistress, oversees the meal. John thinks she is fantastic, but finds her too thin. He sees her not eating at lunch, but admits that her clerical collar makes her look more underweight than she really is. He says she’s his closest friend now that Canon Campbell has died. The previous principal of Bishop Strachan, Old Teddybear Kilgour, hired John on Campbell’s recommendation twenty years ago. John teases Katherine by asking her if she would have hired him at that age—a young, single American man applying to teach at an all-girls school. Kilgour trusted John to take his faculty responsibilities seriously, and not become involved with any students.

Katherine reminds John of Harriet in a way—they both have a gift for sarcasm and diction. He thinks Harriet and Owen would have liked Katherine. He says the Sunday boarders’ lunches are an important ritual to him, combatting loneliness. After lunch, he and Katherine sign up to pray together during an All Night Vigil. John thinks that Katherine is “wise and kind and witty and articulate; and she does not bullshit herself about what Easter means.”

A week later, on Easter Sunday, the weather has miraculously changed from cold and rainy to humid and summery. John compares the change in weather to walking into the bright light from inside the dark tomb where Jesus’s body once lay. John thinks of Owen when he says to Katherine, “He is risen.”

In the summer of 1958, Owen and John turn sixteen and get their drivers licenses. Owen gets his license first, because he had already learned to drive on the quarry roads in his father’s trucks. Dan teaches John to drive that summer in the mornings before his daily rehearsals for Julius Caesar.

In the evenings, Owen drives Mr. Meany’s tomato-red pickup truck down to the boardwalk at Hampton Beach with John. They drive along the strip and look at girls until a cop pulls them over and tell them to look on foot. But if the girls rarely look back at Owen and John when they are driving, they stare and laugh at them when they’re walking, due to Owen’s size. Owen also gets hassled by the other guys around. So he and John leave the boardwalk and head back to Gravesend, or sit on the deserted beach or harbor.

The boardwalk girls may have ignored them, but John notices that women find Owen attractive. He has a confidence borne from earning his way in the world, and from being in command of himself and others. Girls want to touch him, like Mary Beth all those years ago. Then he develops muscles from his hard labor in the quarries with Mr. Meany, and starts smoking a pack a day. The work and the cigarettes give his face a gaunt, adult quality. He and John still discuss breasts, but they compare their classmates’ chests now. They despair that the girls their age all want to date older boys, but await their eighteenth birthdays, when they’ll get their classmates back and the younger girls, too.

In the fall of 1958, when John and Owen finally start at Gravesend Academy, Owen looks especially sophisticated in the clothes Harriet had bought him in Boston. He isn’t scared of the bigger boys because he is used to being smaller, and he isn’t scared of the older boys because he always knoww more than them. The boys admire cynicism and rebellion above all else, and Owen had mastered sarcasm from Harriet. He is nicknamed Sarcasm Master; John never gets a nickname. Owen writes essays for the school newspaper, The Grave, under the pen name The Voice. His articles are always published in capital letters, which is part of his plan to become a school “INSTITUTION.”

Gravesend students embrace The Voice as a new institution—Owen is their voice, speaking up for their causes, asserting their dignity in an environment where they are belittled by the adults. He can also criticize the student body, however, for failing to be open-minded or self-aware, or for bullying. He even speaks out against drinking and drugs, showing a fearlessness towards his peers’ judgment.

That spring, Owen dares to invite Hester to the senior ball as a freshman. He had sent her every issue of The Grave, and she loved the irreverence. She has lost a substantial amount of weight, and mastered a subtle aura of danger and maturity for her age. She dresses well, although John thinks “her body belonged in the jungle, covered only essentially.” She wears a fitted, short, plunging black dress to the dance, and Owen wears an elegant tuxedo Harriet had bought for him. Unlike the other boys, who have to escort their dates straight to the visitors’ dorms, Owen gets to drive Hester back to Harriet’s house.

Other boys brag about their sexual escapades, but Owen does not. Noah and Simon assume Hester had slept with him—“Hester fucks everybody!” Simon claims—but the couple never say how they spend their evening. After the dance, The Voice denounces both the crass bragging of boys claiming to have taken advantage of their dates, and the chaperones’ rapid policing of any forms of affection.

In the search for a new headmaster for Gravesend Academy, the candidates for the job are given subscriptions to The Grave, and they are also given private meetings with The Voice. Several of the faculty object to this, but the faculty adviser to The Grave, Mr. Early, supports Owen. The current headmaster, Archibald Thorndike, also supports Owen, calling him “a delightful little fella” and saying that he “wouldn’t miss reading The Voice—not for all the world!” “Thorny” is an old-school type who believes in “the whole boy,” and believes that well-educated men will improve society by criticizing it. Thorny is nice, but a fool when it comes to managing and modernizing a school.

Over the summer, John gives tours of the school while Owen returns to the quarries. Owen doesn’t talk about Hester, but he is able to score some dates for him and John. They are able to walk the boardwalk after Owen holds his own in a few fights with the punks and earns a reputation as “a mean little fucker.” That fall, Noah and Simon start college in California, while Hester unhappily starts at the state university, where her parents can pay resident tuition. Owen’s cool reputation increases further from dating a college girl.

Back in the present, it’s May, and former U.S. senator Gary Hart has dropped out of the running for president after being found in a hotel with a model. John thinks that Hart will surely be back—“remember Nixon?” John criticizes Americans for caring more about sexual infidelity than Constitutional violations like the Iran-Contra affair. Toronto is rejoicing in the sunshine, but John remembers that Owen hated the spring—it meant school was almost over, and he would be going back to the quarries.

Owen had written a bunch of essays over the summer about the ongoing search for a new headmaster, urging the Search Committee to find someone committed to serving the faculty and the students rather than the alumni and the trustees, who prioritize fundraising above education. Dan argues to the faculty that Owen really loves Gravesend Academy, and his constructive critique is better than blind devotion. Owen’s petition against fish on Fridays is less defensible—he protests against only fish being served in the cafeteria on Fridays for the sake of Catholics who don’t eat meat that day. He wins his case, but it seems more frivolous—and more personal—than his other campaigns. He still calls nuns “penguins,” and often asks, “DO YOU THINK THEY’RE ALL LESBIANS?”

Thorny warns Owen that he’s making enemies, and he should be careful not to give them any way to get him. Although he doesn’t play baseball anymore, once his favorite game, Owen still plays soccer, tennis, and basketball throughout the year. He makes John practice a coordinated “slam-dunk” shot with him, where John boosts him high enough into the air to stuff the ball into the basket. John finds this practice pointless and boring, but Owen says John owes him for all the times he lifted him up unwillingly in Sunday School. He can’t use the move in a game, but he insists “IT’S NOT FOR A GAME.”

Owen and John have plenty of time to practice over Christmas, as the Eastmans continue to not invite them up to Sawyer Depot. John thinks Martha doesn’t want to encourage Owen’s relationship with Hester—that’s what Hester says, at least, but John also thinks she could be making it up to prejudice Owen against her mother. John also has to spend his vacation writing two late term papers, with Owen’s generous aid. He struggles so much with spelling and other schoolwork that he is enrolled in a remedial course and sent to see the school psychiatrist. At the time he was in high school, learning disabilities like dyslexia weren’t widely understood, and students’ academic difficulties were thought to result from stupidity or psychological issues.

The school psychiatrist, Dr. Dolder, believes that John’s studies are hampered by his past and ongoing psychological traumas, no matter how much John insists that he loves Owen and forgives him for the accident, and loves his stepfather and grandmother and doesn’t mind living in two places. Dolder wants John to bring a baseball to his next session, and bring Owen, too, but John refuses.

Back in the present, John buys a newspaper about Reagan’s illegal support for the Nicaraguan contras. He considers again that the sexual misconduct of politicians is so insignificant compared to the immorality of the president who acts above the law and runs guns to terrorists, but Americans only care enough to be outraged by sexual transgressions.

John is teaching his senior girls Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, a nineteenth-century novel about a young woman who was seduced, or raped, and suffered a tragic end. He urges them to pay attention to the meaning of Hardy’s text, but the girls only want to know if they can have class outside tomorrow.

In the winter of 1959, the minister of Gravesend Academy suffered a bad head injury on the icy steps of the church and Rev. Merrill was hired as his temporary replacement. Merrill had to teach the school’s religion classes, where he preached his “doubt-is-the-essence-of-faith-and-not-the-opposite-of-faith philosophy.” Owen is intrigued by the idea of “belief without miracles.” He protests to Merrill, “BUT EVERYONE NEEDS A LITTLE PROOF.” Merrill insists, “Faith itself is a miracle.”

The rest of the Gravesend boys, including John, are “an atheistic mob,” taken with secular writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Sartre, and Camus rather than with Tolstoy, Graham Greene, Joyce, or Dostoevski. Merrill counters the boys with Kierkegaard, who said that faith “is the greatest and most difficult of all things.” Owen defends Merrill’s ideas to the rest of the class: “JUST BECAUSE A BUNCH OF ATHEISTS ARE BETTER WRITERS THAN THE GUYS WHO WROTE THE BIBLE DOESN’T NECESSARILY MAKE THEM RIGHT!” The Voice tells the school to just hire Merrill as the new minister instead of searching for someone else, and they do.

Back in the present, John runs into the mother of a girl in his Grade 12 English class. While he’s talking to her, he thinks of giving a pop quiz on Tess to his class, since he’s sure they haven’t been reading it very carefully. Then he remembers that he and Owen first read the book in Mr. Early’s tenth grade class, when the book shouldn’t have been assigned to them so young. John has even been trying to convince his colleagues to teach it in Grade 13 instead of Grade 12. He struggled mightily when he read it for the first time. “I can’t read this!” he screamed to Owen.

Owen was willing to even read the book aloud to him if that would help, but John refused. Owen says he can either do all of John’s homework for him, or he can teach him how to do it. He wants John to succeed “AFTER I’M GONE,” or at least after high school. He questions John on his plans for the future—work? College? What major? Owen says he’s going to study Geology, and he suggests that John study English. John protests that reading books is difficult, and he hates it, but Owen helps him see that the books are not the problem—the reading is. In the present, he feels terrible for thinking of giving his girls a nasty quiz after remembering how much help he needed.

In the spring of 1960, Gravesend Academy found its new headmaster. Randolph White, or “Randy,” was the headmaster of a small private day school in Lake Forest, Illinois, which John understands to be “a super-rich and exclusively WASP community that does its utmost to pretend it is not a suburb of Chicago.” A few students who came to Gravesend from the Midwest agree that Lake Forest is one of those homogeneous suburbs that exclude black or Jewish families from moving in. White is the only candidate who wouldn’t accept an interview with Owen when he came to visit the school. Education was White’s second career, after running a Chicago meat business. He dresses like a businessman.

Owen predicted the trustees would pick White, also being businessmen. They like decision-makers, and don’t care about his lack of educational background. Owen even suggested that White’s admission policy in Lake Forest had excluded black and Jewish students. He tried to say all this in a column, but Mr. Early cut it for its potential for libel. Dan suggested he try to find proof of White’s school’s exclusionary policies, but Owen can only find hearsay.

Back in the present, John continues to follow the Iran-contra affair in the Canadian newspapers. He vows not to talk about it and confirm his reputation as the obsessed American, but one of his students brings it up in class in order to distract him from the day’s lesson about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. With great self-restraint, John manages to resist her obvious attempt to get him off topic and disguise the fact that she hasn’t done the reading. To himself, he thinks that the Reagan administration is filled with the same kinds of “careless people” who destroy lives in The Great Gatsby.

One of John’s fellow teachers also tries to prompt him into a political rant, but he restrains himself to another line from Gatsby—saying that the Reagan administration demonstrated “an urban distaste for the concrete.” He remembers when Owen taught him how to read better by showing him how to write a complete term paper, and also by making a cheat sheet for him to place over the page he was reading in order to help him keep his place on the page. Owen even encouraged John to learn how to type, since it was easier for him to notice a typewritten misspelling than one in his own handwriting.

In the summer of 1960, John and Owen turned eighteen, and they swam in the quarry lake without a rope. They registered for the draft and practiced the slam-dunk shot in the Gravesend Academy gym. They would time themselves and try to make the shot in less than four seconds. In the fall, Owen used the new photocopier in the newspaper office to make blank draft cards as fake IDs. He sold the cards to students for $21 each.

Back in Toronto in May, Reagan cites his diary as proof he didn’t bring up aid for the contras with the King of Saudi Arabia. Harriet gave Owen a diary for Christmas in 1960—he called her his “BENEFACTOR.” That fall, Owen had been busy protesting Randy White’s first decisions as headmaster—to build himself a new house on campus, to move the morning assembly from Hurd’s Church to the Great Hall in the Main Academy Building, to abolish the Latin requirement, and to change the school’s dismissal policy from a faculty-wide vote to the vote of an Executive Committee. Many of these initial changes are popular, or neutral, in the eyes of the students and faculty. Owen protests that changing the dismissal policy created an oligarchy, but the school is more preoccupied with the upcoming national election.

Owen organizes a mock election for the student body, and he is a big JFK supporter, to John’s surprise—John F. Kennedy is Catholic. JFK wins the student election in a landslide, although most of the students are too young to vote in the real election—the voting age was still twenty-one, at the time. Randy White begins to talk back to The Voice during the morning assemblies, and he personally replaces Mr. Early as the newspaper advisor. Dan and John warn Owen to be careful.

After receiving the diary for Christmas, Owen begins to write in it every night. He writes furiously the night after President Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961. He is impressed with Kennedy’s famous inaugural speech, which he would go on to regularly quote to John: “ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU—ASK WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR COUNTRY.” Owen wants to “BE OF USE WITHOUT BEING USED”; he believes Kennedy is “A KIND OF SAVIOR.”