Character Analysis Of This Boy's Life By Tobias Wolff

Jack represents evil, violence and how people can have a dark side emerge in a period of hardship. As a former choirmaster and "head boy" at his school, he lands on the island having had control and power over others, by overpowering the choir with his bad attitude. He wants to make rules similar to Ralph but his rules are much harsher. Jack’s rules are more black and white.

Secondly, Jack needed to create a sense of urgency and a need for change. Jack was able to create this by communicating his vision by

This shows the deep roots of collectivism in this dystopian society. As he becomes more individualized he finds a lover, the Golden one, and escape into the dark forest. There they both find an old house filled with books and ancient advanced technology. There they both find the concept of ego, the concept of self. He realizes that happiness is found through accomplishing his own purpose in life. Following his own passions and ambitions make him happy. This is illustrated in the following quote “I owe nothing to my brothers… And to earn my love, my brothers must do more to have been

The book “This Boy’s Life” by Tobias Wolff is a memoir written about the author’s childhood memories and experiences. The author shows many different characters within the book. Many of them are just minor character that does not affect the author much in his life choices and thoughts throughout his growth. But there are some that acts as the protagonist and some the antagonist. One of them is Dwight, the protagonist’s or Jack’s stepfather. This character seems to be one of the characters that inhibit Jack’s choices and decisions. This character plays a huge role in Jack’s life as it leaves a huge scar in his memory. The author here spends the majority of time in this character in the memoir to show the readers the relationship between

But Jack cannot change the past. Rather, he must reflect on it as it really happened, allowing those reflections to guide his future conduct and to enrich his relationships with those whom he has helped or hurt. By the end of the story, instead of running from his past, Jack has begun to make restoration for its mistakes by finally marrying his beloved Anne and opening his home to Elliot Burden, the man he long believed to be his father. Jack’s contemplation of the past leads him not to despair, but to a deeper understanding of and compassion for the human race.

Jack's disorders branch out beyond creating vivid fantasy lives for him. He lies often, and not only does he change his grades for the previously mentioned prep school applications, but he routinely changes his C's to A's on the report cards sent home to his mother and Dwight. He lies to priests in confessional and to friends about his hunting conquests. He eggs cars, breaks windows, and scribbles obscenities on bathroom walls and denies it all. Jack routinely convinces himself that he is not even, in fact, lying. Once when he is suspected of carving graffiti on a bathroom wall at school, he recalls that he had spent almost an hour with the vice-principal and had become completely convinced of his own innocence. The more he insisted on it, the angrier the vice-principal got, and the angrier the vice-principal got, the more impossible it was for Jack to believe he had done anything to deserve such anger.

I enjoyed the book, This Boy’s Life and I found the lack of stability in Jack’s life interesting. Jack and his mother, Rosemary, move around a lot in the book, causing Jack to never really have a place to call home. In the beginning of the book, Jack and Rosemary are moving from Florida to Utah to escape Rosemary’s ex-husband, Roy. However, Roy follows them to Utah, so Jack and Rosemary move to Seattle. Then, Rosemary meets Dwight and eventually decides to marry him. This leads to her and Jack moving to Chinook with Dwight and his children. At the end of the book, Jack moves to California for the summer to live with his father and brother. After the summer, he starts prep school at Hill in Washington D.C. Here he gets kicked out his senior year and then decides to join the army. Each time Jack moves, he wants to start a better life for himself, but is never able to accomplish this task. I think that the lack of stability in his life, from moving all the time, is the main reason he cannot change his life around.

First of all, Jack ghosts his morals by painting on a mask. The mask allowed Jack to ignore his connections to civilized society, allowing him to easily kill a pig. The author explains, “The mask was a thing of its

This causes Jack to be driven off the edge in hatred, which also causes his family to be in danger of abuse yet again.

This is the first time jacks true feelings come out and he turns into psycho jack which is connected with the theme. This Scene we get with jack shows the importance of this topic and how it has a deeper meaning.

betrayal, and violence. His father abandoned him seeking to find a life less confrontational to a

On the contrary, Jack chooses how to act regardless of his role models, meaning that he can be held accountable for his own actions. From the beginning of the memoir Jack is depicted as an immature child whose dream it was to transform into someone different. Jack’s dreams of transformation get further and further from reality predominantly due to how he decides to act and the people he chooses to spend his time with. Jack is responsible for his own actions as he is the one who actually decides how he acts. A moment in the memoire where Jack’s delinquency is depicted is when Jack states that “[he] was a thief.

feeling of being isolated where he lived in a world where everyone was like him.

Loneliness is usually a common and unharmful feeling, however, when a child is isolated his whole life, loneliness can have a much more morbid effect. This theme, prevalent throughout Ron Rash’s short story, The Ascent, is demonstrated through Jared, a young boy who is neglected by his parents. In the story, Jared escapes his miserable home life to a plane wreck he discovers while roaming the wilderness. Through the use of detached imagery and the emotional characterization of Jared as self-isolating, Rash argues that escaping too far from reality can be very harmful to the stability of one’s emotional being.

Violence begins to emerge in Jack at the end of the novel. This is the last quality that shows Jack is a dynamic character. By the end of the book, Jack has become a murderer. Not only