Daniel Webster once famously said, “The world is governed more by appearance than realities”. Nothing exemplifies Webster’s statement better than Tobias Wolff’s memoir This Boy’s Life. In the 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
Throughout the novel, Wolff uses short simple sentence to shatter
Throughout the novel, Wolff uses short simple sentence to shatter