Symbolism In This Boy's Life

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In This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff uses cars to highlight the irony of the American Dream, specifically the idea of reinvention. Cars are seen repeatedly throughout the text and are clearly used to further Wolff’s ironic views about the traditional idea of the American Dream. Cars have always been a symbol of escape and starting over, as it gives people behind the wheel the power to escape their old lives and old selves to start anew. However, in This Boy’s Life, we see that cars never give the characters a clean slate, but instead return them to where they began. One of the key elements of the reinvention aspect of the American Dream is changing who you are--leaving your old self behind and successfully becoming the person you want to be. This idea is developed through Toby, specifically his dream to reform himself when leaving Seattle. On the drive to Chinook with Dwight, Toby makes it clear he believes Chinook to be a way to escape his previous life, explaining how “... [he] despised the life [he] led in Seattle… [he] thought that in Chinook… away from people who had already made up their minds about [him], [he] could be …show more content…
Rosemary and Toby’s journey in the beginning of the book from Florida to Utah perfectly embodies this idea. On the road trip to Utah in search for uranium, Toby explains his mother’s plan “...to do some serious compensating: for the years of hard work…as a novice secretary, that had gotten her no farther than flat broke…for the breakup of our family…for the misery of her long affair with a violent man” (Wolff 6). The two leave behind everyone and everything they’ve ever known in the hope to rebuild a more enriched life; Toby and his mother escape their old life of a broken family, violence, and a bad job in the chance that they can start

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