Owen Meany’s Control

At the beginning of the novel, Owen Meany seems to be selfish and slightly controlling. After Johnny’s mothers death, Owen takes the claws from the Armadillo and takes the dress dummy for himself while they are mourning, slightly taking control of the way that they mourn their loss. He pushes religious messages onto Johnny, saying he is God’s instrument by taking the class of the armadillo, and he insists that it is better for Dan that he doesn’t see the dress dummy that looks a lot like his past wife. Owen slightly takes control of this situation, but as the story progresses, he is seen taking more and more control of every situation, while slowly seeming to deteriorate.

Owen starts gaining more control in the Christmas pageant where he gains the role of the Christ child. However, as he gains control, he seems to deteriorate more and more. Owen completely takes over the pageant, changing everything and angering Barb Wiggins, who was used to having the pageant go her way. On the day of the pageant, Barb Wiggins tries to mess with Owen Meany, but he handles the “technical difficulty” well, and further takes control of the pageant by feeding the lines to the angel who couldn’t remember his part. The pageant seems to be going well other than these mishaps, until Owen has a completely unexpected and unnecessary outburst about his parents being in the audience. This made him seem completely disrespectful, for he went off on his own parents just because they were supporting him at the church. His next power trip was when he gained the role of the Ghost of Christmas Future, and basically took over the entire play. His deterioration was shown more when he had a vision of his own grave, with the date that he will die. As someone who does not believe in visions or miracles, I see this as Owen going crazy and completely coincidental that Lydia died during the play. This vision causes Owen to deteriorate even more, since after this, Owen gets even more powerful during his time at Gravesend Academy, begins chain smoking, and gains a bad man reputation at the boardwalk. At the academy, Owen becomes known as the Voice, and becomes more powerful than he ever was before, having basically the entire school behind him. Not only do the students admire him, but the faculty respect him as a higher figure, granting him access to private meetings with possible headmaster candidates. This push for power and list of poor health choices he makes could show that his death is coming soon, so he is almost care free and wants power before he dies. Before Owen dies, I believe that he will continue to hunt for power and he will continue to deteriorate. Also, due to his parallelism to a Christ figure, I believe he will die a martyr in some sort of dramatic fashion. Furthermore, I think that the election of JFK at the end of the chapter will have something to do with Owen’s early death, since Johnny is shown to hate the American government as an adult.