This Boy’s Life Reading Review
This Boy’s Life is a memoir by Tobias Wolff in which he talks about his childhood. This story is breathtaking, powerful, and his descriptions are extremely vivid. People think that the life of an award winner author came from a life of richness and of a good education. This memoir shows that things don’t always end up as we want them. The imperfection of his life is what makes this memoir perfect. This memoir takes place in the different places he lived because he always was in a life on the move and that brought him to make his life as it is. This also is story about hope, in which a C student that was always hanging with the wrong crowed, could make his life work.
The memoir starts when his mother and he are going from Florida to Utah because she had an affair with a crazy guy that is following her and she wants him to leave her alone. When he moves to Utah he wants to change his name to Jack. I think that the problems he had in his house- which were that his dad was cheating on his mother while she had an affair- moved him to want a new start. In the day that him and his class where going to confess themselves for their sins he is incapable of doing that. The nun helps him feel cunfortable and tells him that she confessed about steeling and being a backbiter and she felt better. When he goes to confess himself he tells the sins of the nun even thought he didn’t do that. This shows that he blames himself for the bad things that other people do and that may happen because she feel that it is his fault that his parents separated and that he is in the moved. The weird guy that follows his mother, Roy, is back and it is a bad influence to Jack because he gives him a rifle, which his mother hates because she is scared that he may harm himself or that he may shoot someone. The riffle shows power because all his life he has felt in the middle of the crossfire and now he feels that he can defend himself.
He again is in the move when his mother escapes from Roy and they move to Seattle. Jack gets two new friends that are a bad influenced for him and he vandalizes, steals, and lies. This impact his life because people start thinking bad of him. These problems are brought because of the absence of his mother in his life because she only sees him in the night and has no time for him because she is still working at their house. He also goes this because he wants people to pay attention to him. His mother always said that he didn’t do anything and always defended him till the end which shows haw a mother should be, to always think that your sons are good even thought you know they are bad.
He moves from his house to Dwight’s, his mother’s boyfriend, and there was treated with cruelty. He was scared to stand up for himself and didn’t tell his mother about that when she asked him if he had any problem with her marrying Dwight. He had to survive having to break chestnut with his bare hands and every day he had to deliver the papers in his bike all around the town. Before he moved with Dwight he had said that he was tired of people expecting the worst of him and he wanted to change his attitude. Dwight said that he could not change by himself and that the pain he made him pass will bring him to be a very good person. I feel that the constant abuse lead Jack to be problematic because he had always that hate inside his mind that lead him to do bad things for him to take off that anger.
When his mother left Seattle to move with Jack and Dwight she started to see the dreadful that Jack was passing through and she was also abused by Dwight. This made his mother usually depressed and that problems in the house brought Jack to have as his friends’ kids that were problematic and bad. His mother thru out the memoir agitated because she wanted to get Jack out of all of Dwight’s abuses but she couldn’t because of their lack of money and because Dwight had threatened to kill her. The divorce will cause her to loss the little money they have and she didn’t have any were to stay or take Jack.
Jack’s childhood was full of soreness with the abuses of Dwight and the problem at their dysfunctional family. He also had to suffer a life of being scared because every time Dwight take Jack and his sons we will stop at a boulevard in which he will leave them locked in the car for hours while he drank. He will them drive them at 250km/h around a cliff to scare them and the more they screamed the faster he went and he laughed. He also knew that every time he stranded up for himself or for his mother or Pearl, Dwight’s smallest daughter, he will always he bet up. He had to indorse a life under the shadows of Dwight. This led him to get his uncle to take him to his house but the idea of leaving him mom with Dwight scared him. Dwight also sold Jack’s riffle which symbolized power and sold it to get a hunting dog for himself. This also lead him to work, to put himself by the bootstraps and he got recommendation letters from his teacher- being a C student- to be able to apply to different prep schools for him to get a better education and to be away from Dwight and later on his mother will be able to leave Dwight. She wanted to have a normal family in a house were everyone will be happy.
Jack moves from Dwight after Dwight abused him while he was injured of a deep knife wound. Jack was desperate and one day an ex student of Hill Prep that had done an interview on Jack said that that he won a scholarship and that he had to pay only $500 the year. His mother tells Dwight to take out of the savings the money she needed to pay from the school. Dwight had stolen all their money and had treated his mother that if she left him he will kill her. This problem affected Jack because he finally stand up for himself because he went to Dwight’s house and stole all of his hunting gear and sold it.
Jack moves to Hill and only lasted some months because he was failing and he always did crazy things. At the end of the memoir it tells us of his dream life and how he will have the perfect wife and that he graduated Hill as the first on in class and then went to Princeton. He realizes that we think that life is like a sandbox and that we can shape is as we want it but we can’t. We think that we are the masters of our destiny and that life is perfect but life is cruel and is not like that. What makes someone strong it overcoming our difficulties and survive our cruel world.
This memoir is called This Boy’s Life and it is called like that because it talks about his life. He probably also called it like this because he loved a scout manual called Boy’s Life, in which it talked about of brave boys that save people and that can stand for themselves. He probably called his memoir like this because this brave stories are about himself. The picture of the cover is a drawing of a boy and his mom driving around a cliff. This symbolizes that he never had a place to call a home because he will always he in the move. The cliff probably means that he is in the verge of falling emotionally.
This memoir was organized with different part with a title that had something symbolic to do with the content in the chapter. As for example Uncool in which he talks of all the bad thing he does when he was about in 6th grade and it is named like that because he knows that doing the bad things don’t make people like him. In every chapter there were different narratives that had something to do with what he is telling us. At the end of every chapter he will summarize what he has been talking about, normally using a narrative.
I think that this memoir is the best book I have ever read and it had a spell that made me take so long reading it because I wanted to read every page again and again. It had a description that was so vivid that made me imagine myself sitting in that white couch on the white house with the piano next to me and Jack’s mom being slapped by Dwight’s dark greasy hand. His symbolism was so good that I had to look very hard to see that it was symbolic and what it meant. As I read I felt the anger and weakness that Jack felt. In lots of part I had connections with him because he was a Boy Scout and when he was in the meetings he felt good because he felt disconnected from his problems. I also have a connection with him because he felt out of place as I feel. When Mrs. Meadows gave me this book I wasn’t interested reading it but by page 4 I wanted to keep reading to know of the challenges that Jack has passed.
It was hard to find a line I love because I was about to write the whole book but at the end I got some that are mesmerizing. In page 75 he said “He stopped on the bridge leading to the camp so we could see the salmon in the water below. He pointed them out to us, dark shapes among the rocks. They had come all the way from the ocean to spawn here, Dwight said, and then they will die. They were already dying. The change from salt to fresh water had turned their flesh rotten. Long strips of it hung off their bodies, waving in the current”. I love this quote because it is saying that he is the salmon and that he is scared that he will die in the change from houses. This quote is what inspired me to write as my 6 word memoir “Saltwater salmon in a freshwater river”.
