This Boy's Life By Tobias Wolff

This Boy’s Life Adolescence, it’s a time of change and development with many woes and hardships that can put a major toll on any kid in his or her life. Tobias Wolff portrays his difficult childhood through his immersive memoir, This Boy’s Life. He deals with many family issues like domestic violence and a mother that likes to move off to wherever her heart desires. This causes him to have a reckless childhood and end up in the wrong crowd of kids. His stepfather, Dwight always looked down upon him, made him his own puppet to toy with and took out all his anger on him. He has the intentions to change his wrong ways but in his situation it is hard to find the right lifestyle that makes him happy. Throughout the book, Toby has …show more content…
He mingled with the town hoodlums, stole gas, broke windows and caused lots of choais. Toby wanted to fit in and find where he would be happy and be considered “cool”, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t meet his expectations of wanting to fit in or to be able to label himself as cool. “But it wasn’t our looks that made us uncool. Coolness did not demand anything as obvious as that. Like chess or music, coolness claimed its own out of some mysterious impulse of recognition. Uncoolness did likewise. We had been claimed by uncoolness,” pg 43. Toby and his friends were dressing up and trying their hardest to look cool, yet they knew that no matter how they dressed up they wouldn’t be cool. Later on Toby meets new friends in different towns but always ended up in the same situation, stealing and getting in trouble just to seem popular. No matter how hard Toby tries, whether he hangs out with the wrong crowd or gets into trouble, he still is faced the challenge of finding his place in …show more content…
He struggles to keep up in class and he can not fulfill his dream of getting into a prep school. During his public schooling, Toby doesn’t feel motivated; he feels like he is in some foreign place at school and gets bad marks in his class. He cheats his way through class and changes his report cards to seem like he is doing well and lies about his progress in school. One day he gets into contact to his distant brother who is a student at Princeton. Toby’s brother, Geoffrey encourages Toby to get a good education at a prep school. Toby ends up lying about his performance in his applications and has the audacity to fake his own letter of recommendation. But he luckily got into the Hill School after some convincing but once he attends the school, he feels out of place. Toby was a rebel of a kid and was the complete opposite of the elite gentlemen who attended Hill school. “I did not do well at Hill. How could I? I knew nothing. My ignorance was so profound that entire class periods would pass without my understanding anything that was said,” pg 285. Even after all Toby’s extensive efforts, his pursuit of a good education deteriorates. Hill was completely out of Toby’s league and he was completely out of his place, socially and academically. To conclude, Toby tries his best to endure the day to day struggle of finding his place in