English Notes September 26, 2014 This Boy’s Life Tobias Wolff

Homework: Read pages 11-22. Take notes. Note vocabulary terms that are new to you. Connect your notes to themes (see below).

“The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has yet discovered.”

--Oscar Wilde

Class responses to epigram:

·  Role

·  Identity crisis

·  You don’t know who you’re going to be unless you try

·  Choose who you want to be and pretend to be who you need to be

·  Second duty in life—no one knows what it is

·  Are we always assuming a pose since there is no second lesson?

·  Is identity an act?

“He who fears corruption fears life.”

--Saul Alinsky

Class responses:

·  There is a lot of corruption in life

·  If you are afraid to be corrupted, it will be tough to live life since it is all around us

·  If you are going to live life, you are going to be corrupt

· 

This Boy’s Life

Note the following themes:

·  Transformation

·  Seeking a better life

·  Truth and fact, perspective and imagination

·  Domestic abuse

·  Poverty

·  Dreams vs. reality

Chapter 1, Fortune

·  Truck went over a cliff, mother and son survive

·  Mother puts arm around son’s shoulder, son uses this as an emotional advantage to ask for souvenirs (Indian belt, moccasins, bronze horse with saddle)—1950s when boys would play cowboys and Indians

·  1955—mother and son drive from Florida to Utah to get away from a man his mother was afraid of and to get rich on uranium

·  Drove through states, saw people offering help to the “pretty Yankee lady”

·  Narrator is “caught up in my mother’s freedom, her delight in the freedom, her dream of transformation” (5).

·  Mother—grew up in Beverly Hills before the stock market crash, father lost all of his money, she was chosen to ride a float in the Tournament of Roses called “The End of the Rainbow”—ironic since there is no pot of gold—family lost their fortune

·  Hope of reaching Utah—rags to riches stories

·  Narrator wants to help his mother out of her misery—she had a rough life as a soda jerk, secretary, was broke, had a long affair with a violent man

·  Made it to Utah—no jobs, corruption (prostitutes, murders), Geiger counters cost too much, rooms were expensive, billboards have bullets in them

·  Mother “knew she’d get a job”àdreams vs. reality

Chapter 2

·  Narrator has his own dreams of transformation

·  Wanted to call himself Jack after Jack London (he had a girl named Toby in his class and didn’t want a name that could be confused for a girl’s name)

·  Narrator takes Jonathan as his name--attended catechism classes, took it as a baptismal name, changed it to Jack

·  Father heard that Toby changed his name and was unhappy. However, father bought furniture at antique stores so it looked like old family furniture, invented a coat of arms, family was Jewish but he pretended to be protestant

·  Mother stuck up for new name because the father didn’t like it

·  Father got rich from marrying a wealthy woman—never gave mother and son money

·  Narrator recalls Catholic school—Sister James had clubs to keep kids from converting. He joins the archery club. Boys try to hit cats, and then each other, with the arrows. Sister James catches the boys and tells Toby that “Practice is over.”