Old School Tobias Wolff Summary

As a fiction writer, it is fitting that the narrator in Tobias Wolff’s Old School creates his most elaborate story about himself. As the lower-class, half-Jewish scholarship boy at a mid-century elite boarding school, it is understandable that he is insecure of his position in the school’s social hierarchy. At his school, Jewish kids are discriminated against, and rather than group himself into social humiliation, he chooses to adopt a new personality, joining the ranks of the many upper-class Catholics. By choosing competition over friendship, abandoning his heritage for the opinions of a group to which he does not belong and hiding his status as a scholarship boy by adopting the mannerisms of the upper-class, the narrator distances himself from both his friends and his own identity, compromising and losing …show more content…
Already unsure of the legitimacy of his experience as a Jew, the persona he creates serves only to distance himself further from his heritage. After learning that he had been whistling a Nazi marching song to the Jewish handyman, Gershon, the narrator was confronted with an opportunity to mend his mistake and make a meaningful connection. But rather than reveal his heritage, make a meaningful connection to another Jew at the school, and possibly gain insight into his cultural history, he chooses to abandon Gershon, not wanting to “talk [his] way into [Gershon’s] unlucky tribe.” (23). The narrator here furthers himself from the idea of Judaism, not wanting to be associated with the negative connotations it carried in his school. Caught up in other’s opinions, he allows himself to sink further down into the lie. Later in the novel, Purcell refers to the Bible as a “Hebrew novel,” and the narrator reasserts his distance from the Jews (105). Purcell is unaware of the façade behind which the narrator is hiding, and the narrator has “made sure of that,”