George Meany

Kenya and Asian countries such as Japan and China. I had a great personal interest in this collection because my father was a foreign service officer with the United States Department of State. The posting I remember most was Holland, but his expertise is in Southeast Asia. Thus, our first posting as a family was to Indonesia, and when I was asked to write a blog post, I was happy to choose Indonesia. I wrote a blog post for the Special Collections blog to encourage patrons to explore the contents of the international affairs documents. The blog entry featured elements of the democratic revolution in Indonesia in 1999 focused on labor issues. After that I inventoried African American worker files and then the George Meany AFL-CIO Memorial collections. The George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archive is the largest single donation to the University Libraries and complements other collections related to labor in the libraries. The AFL-CIO records help researchers better understand pivotal social movements in this country, including those to gain rights for women, children, and minorities. Unfortunately, these were a little less organized. Some boxes had loose materials, others had empty folders and there were many undated and untitled folders. The other half of my field study was conducted with Jason Grant Speck, Head of Collections Management for Special Collections and University Archives at the UMD. My work with him has mainly consisted of performing first-level descriptions…

Authors profusely use themes to add dimension, help the reader understand, and direct the reader in following the path of novel’s intention. Providing a novel with the structural value of a theme, the author keeps the reader guided. In a Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving uses themes to combine the complexity of his work. Without the theme of religion/doubt tying in with fate versus free will, the novel would lose substance and value. Faith and religion, without a doubt, is the underlying main…

The first way that Irving shows pleasure and discomfort was through Rev. Lewis Merrill. In this scene, Johnny is mesmerized by the significance of Owen's death. He addresses Dan Needam and Rev. Merrill about his sudden belief in God and that miracles are real. Johnny posed a question asking Dan whether or not he believed Owen's death was a miracle. Dan replied by telling Johhny that he wasn't going to contradict Johnny's belief. Johnny then pose another question emphasizing on whethere or not…

Life is filled with many unexpected situations, nothing ever goes as expected which is the definition behind Thomas Hardy’s quote. The quote reads, “Nothing bears out in practice what is promises incipiently”. Thomas Hardy’s quote relates to a numerous amount of events in A Prayer For Owen Meany mostly with how John’s life starts to unravel. The way John Irving wrote the novel has a unique chronology in the way that the novel tends to skip through different parts of John’s life. A Prayer For…

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…

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,…

Foreshadowing in Owen Meany (612-617) A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving gifts us with the story of Owen Meany, a small, miraculous boy with a big mission. Owen Meany knows that he is ‘god’s instrument’. He later finds out, in a dream, when he is going to die, how he is going to die, and he is going to die a hero. The story offers a great deal of foreshadowing. The main idea that has foreshadowing are things being ‘armless’. Some of these items that are armless include: Owen, the…

Kyle Kennedy Nordsiek Honors American Literature 12 October 2015 Expectations Versus Reality in A Prayer for Owen Meany Throughout A Prayer for Owen Meany, events often do not play out as the characters originally intended or predicted. This motif – that “nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently” – is one of the most important motifs in the novel, and it is realized through several major events. Three components of the book are significant examples of this motif: Johnny’s…

In an ever changing world, what is promised initially may not always go as planned when it is put to the test. John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, tells the story of Johnny Wheelwright, a boy growing up in Gravesend, New Hampshire, struggling with identity and faith. But one cannot tell the story of Johnny Wheelwright without including Owen Meany, the tiny, dwarflike boy who is the only reason Johnny believes in God. Owen is a major spiritual character and his actions have direct correlations…

In his work A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving delves into the fundamentals of faith through his narrator, Johnny Wheelwright, and Johnny’s best friend Owen Meany. Johnny and Owen are best friends as they grow up in Gravesend. Owen and Johnny spend nearly every waking minute with each other, often at Johnny’s grandmother’s house. During one of their many childhood sleepovers, Owen comes down with a fever. After Owen wakes Johnny up, Johnny sends him down the hall to his mother’s room. Johnny’s…