Analysis Of This Boy's Life By Tobias Wolff

This Boy’s Life (Tobias Wolff)
“Growing up wild in post-war America”: the search for self (Dr Jennifer Minter)
In This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff charts the young boy’s trials and tribulations, growing up with a warm-hearted but ineffectual mother and her string of volatile and wounded partners. Poverty-stricken and restless, Rosemary and the 10-year-old Tobias, are often on the move — from Florida, to Utah, Seattle and Chinook — escaping boredom and violence and searching for a sense of home that constantly eludes them. The self-narrative style of writing enables Wolff to delve sharply and candidly into his past memories and recollections of a childhood marred by extreme poverty, loneliness and vulnerability.
Significantly, Wolff opens with…show more content…
Nobody seems to take him seriously. Until we meet Father Karl.
A game of “father and son”
Toby tries unsuccessfully to play father and son with both Roy and Dwight but it is doomed to failure. (84). He is complicit in Dwight’s attempt to lure Rosemary; he finds that they are too deeply entwined to stop the prevent carnage.
Dwight’s attempts to “improve” Toby and turn him into a “man”, highlight the extreme vulnerability and sense of powerlessness that pervade many of the surrogate father figures in the novel.
Dwight constantly sets him up for ridicule. For example, he makes him “shuck” horse chestnuts without gloves, which is an incredibly difficult task. His fingers become covered with a yellow stain and people think that he is hygienically unclean. He forces Toby to do the paper round but exploits him and does not give him his money which angers Toby (221); he has to pawn his rifles. He is referred to as a “sissy” because he initially he does not want to fight Arthur. He abuses him because he discards the almost-empty mustard bottle (171) and when Dwight strikes him despite his finger injury, Rosemary finally knows she must remove Toby from the household.…show more content…
They exert their extreme sense of frustration at the man in the Thunderbird. They pelt him with eggs as a reflection of their own sense of wasted power, their aggression and their envy. “He had everything that we didn’t have (38) They become expert thieves and break, undetected, into the school cafeteria (50). The fact that they are not caught gives them a degree of notoriety; he becomes more confident, “cocksure, insane in our arrogance” (50) But their growing sense of violence, conceals a yawing sense of helplessness.
Toby and Terry Silver practice looking cool in front of the mirror. They try to give themselves an aura of prestige and importance because of their extreme sense of insignificance. “We wore our hair long at the sides, swept back into a ducktail. The hair on top we combed toward the centre and then forward, with spit curls breaking over our foreheads”. But despite the unlit cigarettes that hang from their mouths they do not look as “cool” as they should have (36) His mother forbids the look and he must redo his air before he enters the