In A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving, foreshadowing is employed to enhance the complexity of the ideas of predestination and fate. Irving connects foreshadowing to predestination in that even though Owen has intuitions or visions of the future, he cannot alter this foreseen course of events because it is fated to transpire. The ominous nature of recurring armless imagery and other events that foreshadow the deaths of Tabby and Owen indicate the inexorable nature of a greater force orchestrating events in the universe, conveying that fate is immutable.
Throughout the novel, the most prominently recurring image depicts a series of armless figures, which serve to foreshadow Owen's death by a grenade that blows his arms off. Furthermore,…show more content… After Johnny and Owen perfect the shot, Johnny recounts Owen saying, "IT'S NOT FOR A GAME," and Johnny remarks that "Owen had his own reasons for everything." In this section, the novel highlights Owen's extraordinary abilities in prophesying the future and engenders a foreboding feeling about Owen’s unconventional actions and behaviors.
This idea is further extended through the foreshadowing connected with the imagery of Tabby's armless dressmaker's dummy, which matches the height, size, and figure of Tabby's body. The first inkling of the significance of the armless nature of the dummy arises in Owen's sighting of the Angel of Death. On that night, Owen had a high fever, and Johnny speculates that Owen mistook the dummy for the "Angel of Death." Shortly after this incident, Johnny relates:
"It made [Owen] furious when I suggested that anything was an ‘accident’...there was a reason for that baseball–just as there was a reason for Owen being small, and a reason for his voice. In Owen's opinion, he had INTERRUPTED AN ANGEL, he had DISTURBED AN ANGEL AT WORK, he had UPSET THE SCHEME OF THINGS... I know that's what he believed: he, Owen Meany, had interrupted of Death at her homework; she had reassigned the task–she gave it to…show more content… In fact, at the wedding, "Mr. Meany and Owen [wear] the only dark suits" and Simon comments to Owen, "You look like you're at a funeral." Shortly after, Johnny remarks that "the reception ended in an outburst of bad weather more appropriate for a funeral." The foreboding atmosphere conveyed by this passage presages Tabby's death, connoting the inevitability of it occurring in the manner that it did, at the hands of Owen Meany. When Tabby offers Owen a ride home after the wedding, she has to step out of the car so Owen can enter, and at that moment, a "hailstone [ricochets] off the roof of the car and [smacks] her right between the eyes." Johnny then proceeds to comment, "Squeezing a hailstone the size of a marble in my hand, feeling it melt in my palm, I was also surprised by its hardness; it was as hard as a baseball." The baseball-like hailstone striking Tabby's head is blatant foreshadowing of her death by a baseball to the head, connoting that this was no accident; it was destined to
