This Boy's Life Critical Analysis

Critical Analysis- A Struggle with Identity

This Boy's Life is the autobiographical account of teenager. Toby and his mother's search for financial stability and a peaceful life. Toby’s family was split down the middle as a child, leaving his father and older brother on the East Coast and, for the most part, uninvolved in Toby’s life. The story begins when Toby and his mother, Rosemary, leave her abusive boyfriend in Florida to take their chances at becoming rich on uranium mines in Utah. They are short on money, a theme that continually comes up throughout the book, but full of hope and love for each other. Unfortunately, as they arrive in Utah, they discover the uranium resources have already been bled dry and they must go to Salt Lake City where Rosemary manages to get a job as a secretary. Soon afterwards, the ex-boyfriend follows the pair to Salt Lake City and rejoins their life. His abusive behavior continues and Toby and Rosemary are forced to flee again. This time fate lands them on a bus headed for Seattle. Once in Washington, Rosemary finds a group of female friends who encourage her to start dating, eventually landing her with a relationship and later marriage with yet another abusive man, Dwight. The mother and son pair is in a constant fight for a better way to live in terms of security and stability, but their love and loyalty to each other is solid.

Toby seems to show signs of emotional and behavioral disorders in his journey through adolescence. He develops many different distinct personalities at various points to try to evade the harsh realities of his life. In the beginning of the novel, he expresses an interest in changing his name. He writes, "I wanted to call myself Jack, after Jack London. I believed having his name would charge me with some of the strength and competence inherent of my idea of him.” Toby did change his name to Jack, but the strength and competence that were supposed to accompany the name never appeared. Later, when Jack is given his own gun, he spends hours dressing up in military gear, hiding behind curtains, and pretending to be a military sniper. Several years after this, Jack adopts another identity when the possibility arrives that he might escape his life with Dwight to live in Paris with an uncle. Because of this idea, he once again changes his behavior. He takes his impressions of Paris that came from American movies, in which everyone wore berets and striped jerseys and sat around smoking cigarettes while accordion music played in the background and translates them into his everyday life in Washington. Jack receives special permission to take time off from his regular school studies to complete a series of special projects on the history, culture, and national character of France, and takes up playing the harmonica so that he can honk out moony approximations of “La Vie en Rose” and the theme from Moulin Rouge to prepare himself for his new life in Paris, France. These plans for a daring escape to Paris fall through, but Jack is given new hope of fleeing his reality through regaining contact with his estranged brother, Geoffrey. Geoffrey is a Princeton student, so Jack immediately begins to assume the identity of a Princeton student. He wore the Princeton sweatshirt Geoffrey sent him everywhere, and told strangers who picked him up on the road that he was a Princeton student coming home for a visit. He even had his hair cut in a style called “The Princeton”.

This experimentation with identities climaxes in Jack's applications for prep schools on the East Coast. Though his grades are average at best, and he knows his teachers would be unwilling to make the recommendations he believes he deserves, he transforms himself on paper, at least, into the perfect prep school candidate. As he types up his applications, he begins to describe the process of slipping into becoming this new person. He writes, “Now the words began to come as easily as if someone were breathing them into my ear. I felt full of things that needed to be said, full of stifled truth. That was what I thought I was writing the truth. It was truth known only to me, but I believed it more than I believed in the facts arrayed against it. I believed that in some sense not factually verifiable that I was a straight-A student. In the same way, I believed that I was an Eagle Scout, and a powerful swimmer, and a boy of integrity. These were ideas about me that I held on to for dear life. Now I gave them voice. I made no claims that seemed false to me.”

Jack's disorders branch out beyond creating vivid fantasy lives for him. He lies often, and not only does he change his grades for the previously mentioned prep school applications, but he routinely changes his C's to A's on the report cards sent home to his mother and Dwight. He lies to priests in confessional and to friends about his hunting conquests. He eggs cars, breaks windows, and scribbles obscenities on bathroom walls and denies it all. Jack routinely convinces himself that he is not even, in fact, lying. Once when he is suspected of carving graffiti on a bathroom wall at school, he recalls that he had spent almost an hour with the vice-principal and had become completely convinced of his own innocence. The more he insisted on it, the angrier the vice-principal got, and the angrier the vice-principal got, the more impossible it was for Jack to believe he had done anything to deserve such anger.

Lying is not the only kind of trouble Jack gets himself into. He routinely steals things while roaming the streets of Seattle with his friends. He remembers, “I was a thief, by my own estimation, a master thief. When I cruised the aisles of dime stores, lingering over jackknives and model cars, a bland expression on my face, looking more innocent than an innocent person has any business looking, I imagined that the saleswoman who sometimes glanced over at me saw an earnest young shopper instead of a transparent little klepto.” In the beginning he only steals small things from stores, but later he went on to steal the family car for midnight joyrides, steal gasoline to power that car, and even creates an elaborate scheme to steal bank checks and cash them under a false name. Towards the end of the book, once his mother finally leaves Dwight, he breaks into Dwight's house and steals numerous hunting weapons and ammunition to sell them at a pawnshop in another city.

These brushes with breaking the law are accompanied by what sometimes seems to be a lack of concern for physical safety. In Salt Lake, Wolff remembers using his classmates as targets for archery practice at his catholic school and letting