Johnny Wheelwright In John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany

In reality, how often will somebody encounter a situation where everything worked out exactly how they expected it to? In John Irving’s novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany, the main character, Johnny Wheelwright, references a quote from Thomas Hardy that answers this question: “Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently”. To put it another way, this quote implies that in actuality, things will not usually work out how someone might initially expect it to. The reader can see this motif illustrated throughout Johnny’s documented adventure. This tale of self-maturation and growth revolves around the story of Johnny Wheelwright along with his unusually short companion Owen Meany. As the two boys live out their lives, they embark on a …show more content…
Johnny expresses his childhood frustrations towards his mother for hiding the identity of his father when he says, “It was only after her death that I felt the slightest anger towards her. Even if my father’s identity and his story were painful to my mother… wasn’t my mother being selfish not to tell me anything about my father?” (15). After years of expecting the name of his father revealed, Johnny is met with a rather abrupt reality of his mother taking it to the grave. Furthermore, as a young and naïve child, Johnny immediately assumes his mother kept the secret for reasons not any more complicated than selfishness and maintaining her reputation. When in reality, his mother kept the secret to protect Johnny and her family from a series of blackmail from Rev. Lewis. Additionally, as Johnny and Owen continue their search in Boston, the pair only come face to face with more unexpected outcomes. While in the dressmaker’s shop, his son asks who Tabby Wheelwright is, and at that moment Johnny comes to a realization: “It had just occurred to me that I didn’t know who my mother was, either” (349). After traveling to Boston and planning on finding answers that would resolve Johnny’s inquiries about his father, he was only met with the unforeseen result of even more questions than he had arrived with. Johnny found the unturned stone of his mother’s alter ego as the Lady in Red, a completely different Tabby Wheelwright from the one he knew as his mother. Not only did he leave Boston without the identity of his father, but with the identity of his mother in question as well. In a nutshell, as Johnny continued the search for his identity through finding his father, he does not necessarily come to the conclusions that he expected, rather he often came into contact with what was