Essay On Partiality

The idea of a partial person is not a new thing, nor is it a literary device that belongs solely to a singular author or genre. A person that suffers from physical, mental or spiritual un-wholeness usually serves an important role in the plot. An un-wholeness creates interest as it has a story; blank canvas often says more than a damaged one. Literature uses the idea of partiality just as any other art form does. Dickens’ pulls on heart strings in A Christmas Carol with the crippled Tiny Tim, and Edgar Allen Poe uses missing mental faculties in many narrators such as in The Tell Tale Heart. Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany uses un-whole or partial people in a variety of ways. Spiritual, emotional and physical disparity all present themselves throughout the novel through characters, occurrences and actions. One of the main protagonists, Owen Meany, suffers from a physical …show more content…
When he signed the deed to his land instead of his signet he used his armless totem. The novel offers several interpretations for this choice, one of them being that that is what the sagamore felt like when he gave his land up; that he was chopping his own arms off as he signed his land away. Others in the novel say that the original figure held a feather symbolizing the sagamore’s frustration at being unable to write; still other say there was a tomahawk and he possibly was either crazy or signifying that without his arms he does not fight (Irving 10). With the loss of his figurative arms he has been emasculated and no longer can partake in the violence that is man versus man. Sagamore is also the name of Mr. Fish’s Labrador. An interesting turn of events, as a dog is also without arms. This sagamore was struck by a diaper truck and buried in a rose garden. An animal with no arms and hands, and no control of its fate shares a title with the initiator of the armless symbol in the