Essay This Boys Life
For a young boy living in the chauvinistic milieu of 1950’s America, The male mentors in his life are fundamental to their emotional development and their transformation in from a boy to a man. For Jack the two men who are present for his childhood are violent troglodytes who fail to nurture and encourage Jack which affects him into adulthood. Roy is a controlling misogynist who leaves Jack with a warped impression of masculinity and Dwight’s physical and psychological abuse ‘disfigured’ Jack. Neither of these men seem to be positive role models for an impressionable adolescent boy. The one major positive influence in Jack’s life is Mr. Howard, who is honest to Jack and encourages to achieve his full potential at Hill School. Tobias Wolff employs the use of different uniforms to symbolise the different relationships with Roy, Dwight and Mr Howard.
When the reader is first introduced to Roy, Wolff describes him as the epitome of masculine ideals of the 1950’s: ‘Handsome… had a tattoo, hed been to war and kept a kind of silence about it that was full of heoic implication’, all qualities Jack admired. Because of this, Jack ‘pretended to [himself] that he did like him, even to the point of seeking out his company’, Despite his controlling, abusive nature towards Jack’s Mother. In the scenes in which Roy is present in Jack’s life Wolff avoids using strong adverbial and adjectival language, and never says anything directly negative about Roy, demonstrating the deep
As Jack’s step father, Dwight should be a positive paternal figure, however Dwight is anything but fatherly. Instead, in a crude attempt to make Jack a better boy, he ‘made tha study of [Jack]’, constantly pointing out his flaws and filling his ‘free time’ by arranging for Jack to “take over the local paper route… join boy scouts [and gave [him] a heavy load of chores’ to keep him busy and isolated from the family. The only instance in which Dwight is remotely fatherly towards is when he teaches Jack how
When the reader is first introduced to Roy, Wolff describes him as the epitome of masculine ideals of the 1950’s: ‘Handsome… had a tattoo, hed been to war and kept a kind of silence about it that was full of heoic implication’, all qualities Jack admired. Because of this, Jack ‘pretended to [himself] that he did like him, even to the point of seeking out his company’, Despite his controlling, abusive nature towards Jack’s Mother. In the scenes in which Roy is present in Jack’s life Wolff avoids using strong adverbial and adjectival language, and never says anything directly negative about Roy, demonstrating the deep
As Jack’s step father, Dwight should be a positive paternal figure, however Dwight is anything but fatherly. Instead, in a crude attempt to make Jack a better boy, he ‘made tha study of [Jack]’, constantly pointing out his flaws and filling his ‘free time’ by arranging for Jack to “take over the local paper route… join boy scouts [and gave [him] a heavy load of chores’ to keep him busy and isolated from the family. The only instance in which Dwight is remotely fatherly towards is when he teaches Jack how