Thomas+McKeon

Thomas McKeon


 * This Boy's Life Plot **

 In 1955, Toby Wolff and his mother travel to Utah to make their fortune by mining uranium. While there, Toby changes his name to Jack and also to remove himself from his father, who abandoned Jack and his mother shortly after Jack was born. Roy, Rosemary's second husband, follows Jack and his mother from Florida to Utah. When Roy is away, Wolff and his mother move to Seattle and meet Dwight, who seems harmless until Jack moves to Chinook to live with him, It is there that Dwight reveals himself to be cruel and abusive. Jack longs to escape from Chinook so that he can recreate himself, but he can only live the life he wants for himself in his own mind. Jack essentially creates his own reality. In school, Jack tends to run with a dangerous crowd, often getting into trouble with the authorities, but in his applications to private schools, Jack writes that he is an A-student, star athlete, and good citizen. Jack is obsessed with the idea of himself as a virtuous and gifted young man, and has no trouble believing his that lies are the truth. Jack has many dreams of running away, but he never succeeds in following through with them. He finally gets the opportunity to leave Chinook and start anew when he is accepted to the elite Hill School. Before Jack leaves home for Hill, he and Rosemary leave Dwight after he shoves Jack in front of her. Rosemary arranges for Jack to live temporarily with his friend Chuck Bolger. Soon after living there Wolff gets into trouble so he leaves to spend the summer in California with his father and brother. Soon after arriving Jack's father is arrested and later committed to a sanitarium, where he remains for the rest of the summer. Jack cannot make the grades that Hill demands, and is expelled midway through his senior year. After he is expelled from school, Jack joins the army and serves in the Vietnam War.

Oscar Wilde once wrote “The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has yet discovered.” Tobias Wolff uses this epigraph throughout his memoir This Boy’s Life. The theme he writes about is finding his identity. The memoir takes place starting in the mid-1950s when he and his mother are driving to Utah to “start life over”.
 * Book Review**

Wolff writes a snapshot of his life from the time he leaves Florida until the time he leaves high school. Toby changes his name to Jack on the drive to Utah. This is when he first loses his identity. He writes on page 8 “I didn’t come to Utah to be the same boy I’d been before. I had my own dreams of transformation.” He assumes the identity of a favorite TV character and attempts to live as he does. Jack gets into trouble out of boredom and lack of supervision, and generally seems to be on a course that will limit a successful future. However, through the years he learns to survive and find his identity.

He is a troublemaker that always seems to find the bad crowd to hang around at every school he attends. His thoughts insist he hates the way he is and doesn't understand why he does what he does. At confession Wolff chooses not to confess his own sins but those of his teacher. Here he tries to take her identity because he doesn’t know his own.

Wolff's memoir tells of his teen years as a wonderful tribute to a time that most affects his adult life. Throughout the memoir the reader discovers Jack wants to better himself by taking up an identity that will change him. He wants one that will “save him” from being the type of kid he doesn’t want to be: a student that a teacher gives up on just because they do not perform as well as other students. It is not until later in life that Jack finally finds the identity he had been looking for his whole life: his own.