The Path to War in This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff

Must you have battle in your heart forever?

The bloody toil of combat?

--Homer, The Odyssey

Shortly after the publication of his memoir, This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff addressed the topic of Vietnam. When asked about the influence of Vietnam in This Boy’s Life, Wolff responded that he “wanted the reader to be aware very early on that this boyhood is a progression to a place. That the boyhood obsession with weapons has a terminus somewhere, that it ends in war. There’s a logical progression in the kind of life that boys are encouraged to lead and dream of in this country. There’s a lot of violence in the book- a lot of male violence. That kind of thing all goes somewhere.” For Toby, Wolff’s younger self, that “kind of thing” led to Vietnam.

Sociologist James W. Loewen names the process through which boys are encouraged to dream of going to war “heroification.” Heroification works because our educational media and the media in general turn flesh-and-blood individuals into pious, perfect heroes without conflicts, suffering, or complications. According to Loewen, this process implies that the purpose of teaching history is to disguise the truth because people don’t want complicated icons. Instead, the purpose of teaching history as stated by Richard Gross, former president of the National Council for the Social Studies, is to “develop in the young such traits as character, morals, ethics, and good citizenship.” To do this, the media and education create mythological figures out of men, turning them into symbols of these desired traits. As a result, the complex, often painful realities of real people become muffled “under a blanket of nostalgic adulation.” Toby and his friends, for example, watch war documentaries and fantasize about becoming soldiers. Yet, they seem painfully oblivious to the disturbing realities of the men they want to emulate. In this way, This Boy’s Life reflects the heroification process at work through a young boy’s obsession and adulation of the war hero.

More importantly, in This Boy’s Life Wolff breaks down this myth-making function through his depictions of the damaged men who more than a decade later still felt the emotional ripples from WWII. This is a story that is different from the surface narrative of nostalgia, one with more shades of sorrow and anger mixed with youthful idolatry. The WWII generation is sometimes referred ...

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...gher than the sentimental tributes portray.

It is hardly surprising that boys like Toby who dreamed of battle were unprepared for the reality of war, since the real problems of their parents’ generation were eclipsed by “nostalgic adulation” of myth-like heroes. In the words of Tobias Wolff, “I went into the army…. It seemed to me when I got there that this was where I had been going all along, and where I might still redeem myself. All I needed was a war. Careful what you pray for.” There may be times when war is necessary, but if we send soldiers into harm’s way, then ideally our youth should be under no illusions about what that means and that the repercussions are felt long after the fighting stops.

Works Cited

Brokaw, Tom. The Greatest Generation. New York: Random House, 2004. Print.

Childers, Thomas. Soldier From The War Returning. New York: Houghton Mifflin

Harcourt Publishing, 2009. Print

Lyons, Oliver, and Bill Bonnie. "An Interview with Tobias Wolff." Contemporary Literature. 31.1 (1990): 1-16. Web. 12 Feb. 2012.

Mathews, Tom. Our Father’s War: Growing Up in the Shadow of The Greatest

Generation. New York: Broadway Books, 2005. Print