Yash Gupta
Alex Mouw
18 October 2015
Old School - Tobias Wolff
Textual Analysis
Set in an elite school in an elite school in the north east, a place of wealth, tradition and calculated nonchalance.
It’s extremely similar to an old european atmosphere just as the United States was coming out of the phase of the second world war and into a much freer time.
Tobias wolff resembles the Narrator in many ways. Wolff grew up in the North west and later came east to attend the Hill School, a boy’s boarding school in Pennsylvania. It should be noted however, that the events in the novel ‘Old School’ are imaginary. and are a work of fiction rather than a straight up autobiography. Wolff suggests at some points in the book that the narrator was actually
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him, however, we can never truly tell whether it is Wolff or not. He has left that possibility open to engage the reader in a first person narrator mode. The school that Wolff talks about in this book sounds like a typical boys’ boarding school from the 1960’s or 1950’s with a little imaginary concepts set forth by the author to a certain degree.
One could easily attest to the fact that Tobias Wolff was actually taking his experiences at the Hill School in Pennsylvania into account when he wrote this book. This is probably why the rhetorical devices in this book are so vivid and clear.
Wolff manages to capture the environment of this “Old European styled school” and the life inside this school extremely well. Old school describes a teenager’s struggle to find his true honest self. In many ways, The narrator, who craves friendship and acceptance among his friends and classmates, is an outsider to this privileged environment, as he comes in as a “Scholarship Student”. So much so, that he tries to hide the fact that he is a scholarship student from his colleagues.
He is clearly an outsider in a manner that he is not from the east coast, his father is jewish, and that makes him self conscious. When the author discovers that he is jewish, he conceals his background from is classmates in fear of jeopardising his hard earned position in his delicate social
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life. The author comes from an underprivileged background.
When you compare that to the other students at the school, who are so privileged that they don’t even need schooling to reach the top. So, even if he was not Jewish, he would’ve already been considered a lower class student in front of these over-privileged kids. The one thing that did unite these different classes was: their love and respect for literature.
Most of the characters in the book, not just the narrator, are literary fanatics. Like his classmates, he has an undying love for writing and learning about his writing idols, he even helps edit the school’s literary magazine.
The most important aspect of the story that we are introduced to, is the “Literary Contest”. In this contest, the students are given the opportunity of a life-time to get a one on one interview with a highly acknowledged and critically acclaimed writer: from Robert frost and Ernest Hemingway to Ayn Rand. For this, the contestants had to submit a piece of writing that would be selected by one of these renowned writers. The narrator cared deeply about this competition as he says,
“I’m not exaggerating the importance of these trophy meetings. We cared. And I cared as much as anyone because I not only read writers, I read about
writers.” “I loved frost without ever understanding frost at that age” - Tobias Wolff Although he doesn’t win the competition with his poem, the narrator and his classmates observed Robert Frost carefully during his visit, studying his gestures and expressions in the dining hall and when he was making his address in the school chapel and tapped on the microphone to check if it was working. There’s a certain aura of seriousness among these teenagers; a seriousness of becoming writers. The earnest nature of these students was captured beautifully by Tobias Wolff. How everyone wanted to write stories and impress each other with those stories is probably what truly grasps the person into that story. And yet, the author feels absolutely out of his place because he still feels like he doesn’t belong in company of these privileged students. This creates a lot of tension and makes the character truly human. One night, the narrator drafts a poem that describes his life and a strange relationship with his father and their broken home. As he reads over the poem, he explains, “I could see myself there, even though I don’t want to, and moreover, I don’t want anyone else to.”
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