Harland and Wolff

response, I decided to write a series of letters between the characters of Tobias and Arthur Wolff. This seemed appropriate given that the text provides a range of viewpoints in the form of letters, notably ones of serious and important matters. I thought it would be interesting to view the memoir from a new perspective of Arthur Wolff as well as the reoccurring perspective of the adolescence, Tobias Wolff. Throughout the memoir Arthur Sr. was an elusive father-figure and would only be mentioned…

This Boy’s Life is a memoir written by Tobias Wolff. It describes his childhood, like how he changed his name to Jack. When Jack was young he often changed households until they finally ended up with Dwight. This might have an effect on his morality, or at least his morality as a child. Throughout the novel Jack acts like an egoist as his actions are done to benefit himself in some way. Jack is still fighting Arthur even after rolling down the hill that led to the bank they are currently…

memoir, Wolff uses myriad techniques to create an unsparing self-portrait that shatters the audience’s image of childhood and highlights the difference between the reality of his childhood and the falsified image of it that he constructed at the time. He uses this to achieve his purpose of demonstrating how appearance can have more weight to an outcome than reality. The author employs short simple sentences, so as to shatter the image of a time of innocence. By the use of metaphors, Wolff…

Though the novels Old School by Tobias Wolff and The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy each portray a young male narrator’s experience at all-male, private schools in the 1960s, the two schools they portray are of entirely different natures. The unnamed school in Old School is an academically focused, small, liberal-arts style college preparatory school in the northeast while the Carolina Military Institute of The Lords of Discipline is a rugged, military based school in Charleston, South…

Literary elements are the salt of literature. When used correctly, they bring out the flavor of a story, but when misused, they ruin the original creation. In This Boy’s Life: A Memoir, by Tobias Wolff, and In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez, literary elements are used to create delicious stories. This Boy’s Life: A Memoir chronicles the author’s childhood and adolescence in Seattle during the 1950s, which includes a broken home, lying, stealing, and cheating. In the Time of…

Tobias Wolff is an American author who is known for his memoirs and short stories. Wolff wrote many short stories, notably "The Rich Brother." The Rich Brother is a story about two brothers with two completely different lifestyles. Pete, the oldest, is a financially successful business owner with a family and nice house. Donald, the youngest, is a free-flowing soul searching for the right religion, with not much in his name. The story is about how Pete goes to pick up Donald from a religious…

In search for one’s true self, the adversities that are faced are all dependent on the environment in which the person surrounds himself or herself with. Tobias Wolff demonstrates the struggle of finding a true identity when consumed by such harsh surroundings in his bildungsroman style memoir ‘This Boy’s Life”. Despite each personas dreams of transformation, the memoir depicts each character’s struggles to find their identity given the patriarchal society in which they are exposed to; where men…

Randall Pearson is a fictional character from the show This Is Us on NBC. The show takes place in current day when Randal is 36 years-old, but with the use of flashbacks, we learn a lot about his life growing up. Randall was born on August 31st, 1980 in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania to a heroin-addicted father and a mother that died during childbirth. Knowing that he was not fit to raise a child, Randall’s biological father, William, left Randall outside the local Fire Station. Randall was later…

“The hunters in the Snow” is a short story by Tobias Wolff. The story opens up with an overweight man named Tub. He waits for his friends to come pick him up for over an hour and when they show up Kenny, the driver, plays joke acting like he was going to run him over. Tub complained and Frank, his other friend, told him to relax that it was just a joke. Once Tub was in the car, they drove to the woods to go hunting for deer. Once there the story shows that Kenny and Frank were closer than they…

short story also demonstrates what it is like for a mother to go through having a 10 year old boy begging for a gun along with Roy, her ex-husband also whining about Wolff not getting his Winchester .22. The suspense of Wolff and Roy illustrates the power a man and/or a kid can have just because they got what they wanted. Tobias Wolff description of Roy that he is stingy, slow to take a hint, normally quiet, and a relentless whiner when he doesn't get what he wants. Roy, a "handsome" man…