This Boys Life

333 Words2 Pages
‘It is difficult for the reader to feel much affection for the protagonist in Wolff’s memoir This boys life’ Do you agree? Throughout The memoir ‘This boy’s life’ written by Tobias Wolff about the authors childhood and adolescents the reader finds it hard to give affection to Toby Wolff, the protagonist who is a young boy travelling around with his mother, Rosemary. However, there are some places throughout the memoir where it is hard not to have affection for Toby. Rosemary and Toby have been through nearly everything, from Rosemary struggling to find a job and a good healthy relationship to Toby getting up to mischief like drinking, lying, and even stealing. The author’s blunt descriptive approach of the mischief in his past makes it even more difficult to have affection for the boy. Toby is described and made out to be a typical no good teenager who around his mother, is a nice behaved boy, however when with friends or by himself alone Toby gets up to no good. “We drifted in and out of stores, palming anything”. This quote shows how much Toby didn’t care, how cold hearted and ignorant he was as a boy. Not only this but Toby’s obsession for firearms and shooting made him out to be an empty hearted person, resulting in even less affection for the boy. Wolff, through the use of such descriptive language has shown readers that his childhood/adolescence had a lot of crime throughout it, One instance which shows the reader just how bad Toby was is when he is following a couple with his rifle given to him by Roy, and then goes on to shoot a squirrel dead. The way Wolff describes the killing is also very chilling, “It looked like a scarf someone had dropped”, Objectifying the dead animal showing a lack of affection or any care factor, making it even more difficult quite early on in the memoir for readers to have any affection for Toby.

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