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First published in 2004.
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Sciortino, Sue.
The stories of Tobias Wolff.
For senior secondary English students.
ISBN 1 920693 57 2.
1. Wolff, Tobias, 1945- The Stories of Tobias Wolff. 2.
Wolff, Tobias, 1945- – Criticism and interpretation. I.
Title. (Series : Insight text guide).
813.54
contents
Character table
iv
Introduction
1
Background & context
2
Genre, structure & style
6
Story-by-story analysis
10
Characters & relationships
34
Themes & issues
45
Questions & answers
56
References & reading
60
iv
CHARACTER TABLE
Character Types in The Stories of Tobias Wolff
Control
Freaks
Liars
Redheads
Encounters
with
Strangers
Lonely/
Isolated
Women
The
Vulnerable/
Victims
Try to control
those close to
them in order
to compensate
for their own
perceived
failings.
Create a more
colourful world
for themselves,
often in
response to
loss or poor
self-esteem.
Represented in
a derogatory
sense from
protagonists’
points of view.
Life changing;
often eccentric,
strongly
individual
characters.
Objects of
pity; reveal the
effects of the
breakdown
in social
structures,
especially in
families.
Show the
effects of
circumstances
on individuals;
not inherently
bad, but
struggle to
make good
choices.
Wharton,
‘Poaching’
James,
‘The Liar’
Riley, ‘An
Episode in
the Life of
Professor
Brooke’
Hope,
‘Desert
Breakdown,
1968’
Marty,
‘Sister’
Jean,
‘Coming
Attractions’
Brooke,
‘An Episode
in the Life
of Professor
Brooke’
Lewis, ‘The Barracks Thief’
Bonnie,
‘Passengers’
Virginia,
‘Face to Face’
Hubbard, ‘The
Barracks Thief’
Martin,
‘Passengers’
Father Leo,
‘The Missing
Person’
Sandra, ‘The Missing Person’
Davis, ‘Worldly
Goods’
Howard,
‘Maiden
Voyage’
Jerry, ‘The
Missing Person
Ruth, ‘An Episode in the Life of
Professor Brooke’
Porchoff,
‘Soldier’s Joy’
Pete,
‘The Rich
Brother’
Tub, ‘Hunters
in the Snow’
The teacher,
‘The Barracks
Thief’
Dave, ‘The
Poor Are
Always With
Us’
Jean, ‘Coming
Attractions’
Webster,
‘The Rich
Brother’
Mary, ‘In the
Garden of
the North
American
Martyrs’
Eugene,
‘Smokers’
1
INTRODUCTION
As evidenced by his many literary awards, Tobias Wolff is a master of
the short story form. His main focus is on the psychological interaction
between his characters, particularly Americans in the west of the United
States. These are moral stories, but they are not didactic or cautionary and
all speak to the human condition.
Wolff taps into the anxieties of his own society caused by the
fragmentation of modern American life, with his work revealing an
incredible memory for the minutiae of existence. It is this attention to detail
and the humanity he shows towards his fellow men and women that makes
his stories so compellingly readable.
Carefully selected for a uniformity of tone and pace, the lives of ordinary
people, dealing with problems and situations that are almost mundane,
unfold through the pages of Wolff’s stories. Collectively, these characters
form a kind of community based on the questions that preoccupy them
as Wolff delves into their most intimate emotions and experiences. But he
never condemns them for their mistakes, or for the possibility of evil that
some characters exhibit. As he probes the falsity, conscious or unconscious,
in the way we live Wolff reflects our own lives, for the characters he
describes, with all their personal foibles and frustrations, strike a chord in
the reader’s consciousness and produce a sense of authenticity. His view is
a bleak one as people are revealed in the complex consequences of their
decisions in order to bring to the reader a moment of personal insight.
These stories often take place in strange, unfamiliar places
where the characters are unsure of how to act: a hunting trip
with friends becomes a look into the nature of friendship; an
academic conference reveals a professor’s self-deception. Wolff
takes his protagonists out of their regular routines and places them
in unaccustomed settings. By examining their reactions he can
illuminate human behaviour for his readers.
Wolff’s personal view of literature and reading is that it is a way of
understanding the world and oneself that is unavailable through any other
means. Despite modern communications, including television and the
Internet, books still provide a more real sense of who we are within a
secular and material culture that has little room for individuals inhabiting
a soulless urban lifestyle.
2
Insi gh t Te xt Gu i d e
Wolff finds it irresistible ‘to catch people at a moment where, if they
turn just five degrees in another direction…they’re going to end up far from
where they’d have gone if they had continued on their original course’.1
Thus it is the choices people make, or do not make, that Wolff focuses
on because we reveal our true selves through the consequences of our
decisions. Most of all, Wolff creates credible characters and situations that
engage his readers in a mutual exploration of human behaviour.
BACKGROUND & CONTEXT
About the Author: Tobias Wolff
Born in 1945 in the southern state of Alabama, Wolff grew up in Washington
State in the Pacific Northwest and it is this area that he uses for the settings
of most of his stories. He grew up in mainly working-class circumstances
but later went to schools that put him in an upper-class environment. This
gave him a moral order, a code to live by, and he learned from that.
As a young man he was on active service as a Green Beret in Vietnam.
He believes that the experience in Vietnam:
has very much influenced my outlook on things, since the whole
thing was a massive exercise in national and personal selfdeception…I suffered myself as a result of that self-deception and
truly cynical manipulation of people’s faith.2
This background exposed Wolff to a wide group of people and
introduced him to different kinds of professional worlds. He believes that
the purpose in reading is that it makes it possible to see life and understand
it, to make sense out of what happens.
Wolff received the first PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction in 1985 for ‘The
Barracks Thief’ and has been nominated again in 2004 for his novel Old
School. He has also received the 1989 Rea Award and the O. Henry Award
three times for his short stories.
He taught creative writing at Syracuse University for seventeen years
and is now a tenured Professor of English at the prestigious Stanford
University in California.
1
2
Tobias Wolff, ‘An Eye for What is Human’, interview with Wolff for The Atlantic, Nov. 1996.
Wolff, ‘An Eye for What is Human’.
Th e St ori e s of Tob i a s W o l f f
The Short Story Tradition in the United States
1660-1899
The American literary tradition began as early as the first settlements in North
America. The first colonists were from diverse groups in Europe, but many,
like the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, were noble-minded men, educated and
enthusiastic about beginning life in the New World. The Englishmen who
migrated to North America in the early years of the seventeenth century
encountered a wilderness full of danger, excitement and mystery, which
they wrote about in journals, letters and poems.
By the time of the American Revolution in 1776, the founders of
the United States of America had shown themselves to be able
satirists, pamphleteers, essayists and orators. With independence
also came the impetus for the widening of literary skills and the
development of a literary imagination.
By the first half of the nineteenth century a great literary tradition had been
established in the United States. Its proponents during the 1800s included
such writers of distinction as Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Herman
Melville and Mark Twain. Many of them specialised in shorter fiction as
well as the novel. These included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving,
James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, O. Henry, Jack London and Henry
James as well as Melville, Twain and many others. The poet Emily Dickinson
was a notable female contributor to American literature.
Although their work was built on the English literary heritage, their
fertile imaginations produced literature that was original, experimental
and which challenged the accepted ways of writing, particularly in short
fiction. This new literature suited a mercantile, democratic nation that was
not hampered by past traditions. Its writers explored not just their own
lives in America but also the spirit of place, an essential component in the
development of a new nation’s literature. They also engaged with such
matters as concern all citizens – the examination of public institutions, of
established mores and social issues.
Nowhere in the English-speaking world has the art of the short story
flourished more abundantly than in the United States, which in part reflects
the journalistic necessity of producing saleable work that could easily be
published in newspapers, journals and periodicals. A ready market was
available for those who could:
3
4
Insi gh t Te xt Gu i d e
Make it concrete, to the point, with snap and go and life, crisp and
crackling and interesting…avoid platitudes and commonplaces.
Get the atmosphere…strong colour…Seize upon things salient,
eliminate the rest and you have the pictures…in words. Then put a
snapper at the end.3
1900-2000
In the twentieth century, particularly in the period since World War II,
the literature of the United States entered a new phase of development.
Daringly experimental in many instances, this new fiction has a maturity,
sophistication and philosophical depth that has revitalised the genre. Much
short story writing of this period is concerned with the rebellion of the
young and the problems of an ageing population, neither of which have
the same family structures to rely upon as existed in the past.
The second half of the twentieth century also saw a revolution in
communications, particularly with the introduction of television and
advances in telephone technology. These were of concern for writers
even before the introduction of home computers and the ballooning of
information accessibility via the Internet. World travel also became an
option for many more people in this period.
Post World War II, the issues of feminism, and of race, particularly
regarding the oppression of African-Americans and other racial minorities,
have been at the forefront of the American short story oeuvre. Many writers
have been concerned with white and black cultures in the southern United
States. In addition, the subject of potential violence, for many short story
writers including Wolff, is never far from the surface. These writers examine
their society through the use of satire, humour, irony and the inevitability of
suffering as a natural part of human life.
The short story has continued to be a vital way of exploring life,
liberty and the meaning of happiness in a dynamically imaginative way.
The genre, because it is not an expensive production, continues to find
avenues of publication often in low budget, avant-garde magazines. This
has permitted experimentation with ideas as well as a spirit of revolt to
flourish among contemporary writers such as Tobias Wolff.
3
Jack London, quoted in John Cournos, (Ed.), American Short Stories of the Nineteenth
Century, Dent, London, 1963, p.ix.
Th e St ori e s of Tob i a s W o l f f
Wolff’s Place Within the Short Story Tradition
Like his contemporary, Raymond Carver (1938-1988), Tobias Wolff was
a major force in the revitalisation of the short story form in the 1980s.
Both these writers were heavily influenced by Ernest Hemingway’s style of
writing short stories, and both locate their stories in the Pacific Northwest.
With their gritty depictions of everyday life, the stories of Wolff and
Carver demonstrate a compassionate understanding of human foibles.
While Carver died at a relatively young age, Wolff has continued to write
award-winning stories, as well as the novel Old School and the memoir
This Boy’s Life.
Settings
Taken from previous collections, this volume of Wolff’s stories encompasses
most of his writing published in the 1980s. Most are set in and around
Washington State, Oregon and south to California. This is the region where
Wolff grew up and he has retained an attachment to the area that sees his
characters most at home there. The description ‘there was no edge to the
land where it met the sky’ (p.16) demonstrates Wolff’s love for the location.
Washington State continues to be a locus of Wolff’s imagination because,
from a distance of both space and time, he can mythologise it.
Within that area, though, the stories are often set in what are for the
characters strange, unfamiliar places where they are unsure of how to act.
Some involve isolated places such as a snowy field where three men go
hunting (‘Hunters in the Snow’), an exercise station in a park (‘Sister’), a job
interview (‘In the Garden of the North American Martyrs’), a theatre after
hours (‘Coming Attractions’) or a road where two people are forced together
in a car (‘Passengers’). In a sense the geographical location is irrelevant. It
is the mores and values of the characters that matter and these very much
exemplify, in general, west coast Americans in the 1980s.
Some of the stories are set within military precincts and clearly refer
to Wolff’s service as a Green Beret in Vietnam, although all these stories
are located in the United States rather than overseas. Again, the location
is unimportant because the psychological profiles of people, including
soldiers, provide the focus; even the characters in these stories have some
kind of social intercourse with civilians off the base. The most notable
is ‘The Barracks Thief’ where the interaction with family and outsiders is
crucial to the shaping of the plot.
5
6
Insi gh t Te xt Gu i d e
GENRE, STRUCTURE & STYLE
The Short Story Genre
The modern short story is a work of art, relatively short with an interest
in having an emotional impact. Writers like Wolff do not always observe
the traditional elements of fiction, such as the introduction, rising action,
climax, falling action and an ending that ties the work together. He often
provides a subtle ending that almost seems a disconnection from what has
happened in the plot.
A short story should be able to be read in a single sitting. This gives the
piece a unity by focusing on one isolated incident in the life of a character
or in one character’s relationship with another or others. An atmosphere is
created in which the characters live and function. This, in turn, evokes an
emotional response from the reader.
The action is an important element of the short story. Something must
happen, no matter how small. There must also be a narrative of some kind.
The strength of the modern short story lies in its effectiveness as a
microcosm of society, through its great intensity and unity. Everything is
connected and has meaning; yet the contemporary short story can often
show that life is not predictable, no matter how carefully people plan it.
Structure
There are particular features of writing that are required for the composition
of a successful short story. Unlike the longer novel form of fiction, the short
story must contain an idea that can be worked through entirely within
a restricted word limit. Although this does not allow for the creation of
an extended psychological study of characters, it is surprising how much
readers know about a character that is painted in short, deft phrases.
Introductions
The openings of stories must immediately draw the reader in and create
interest. The emotional tone of the introduction sets the scene, creates the
atmosphere and places characters in time and surroundings. One of the
most obvious features of Wolff’s stories is the opening sentence. Short and
to the point, these sentences immediately introduce either a character or
plot, but usually a distinctive feature of a character. Take the opening to
‘Poaching’, for example, which tells the reader: ‘Wharton was a cartoonist,
and a nervous man – ‘highstrung’, he would have said’ (p.130). This not
Th e St ori e s of Tob i a s W o l f f
only gives the character’s occupation and a description of his temperament,
but also portrays his own assessment of his disposition, which is likely to be
self-obsessed. The clues to Wharton’s character are already set out for us.
Body of Story
There needs to be an organising principle for the story; for example, all
of the people in these stories inhabit some common world and the same
moral and spiritual preoccupations gnaw at them. Nearly all of Wolff’s
characters are white and from the northwest of the United States, and thus
share similar concerns and values. Many of the plot lines seem trivial, such
as that of the first story, ‘Next Door’, a short piece about the annoying
habits of the narrator’s neighbours. What is important is the exploration of
the narrator’s dissatisfaction with his life and his yearning to escape from
it (pp.9-14).
The deft development of character and plot is central to the short story
and is focused on the conflict around which the story takes place. This
conflict could be between characters, between characters and society,
between characters and nature, or within the psyche of the main character.
‘Face to Face’, for example, is the exploration of Robert’s inadequacies and
inability to ‘face’ reality. His inability to make an emotional connection
with a partner leaves him the object of pity (pp.63-72).
Endings
The converging of all the narrative elements creates the climax and in the
short story the ending comes from the falling action after the climax. In
Wolff this can often be abrupt or come out of nowhere, be positive or
negative, or generate a tangential or ambiguous ending. In ‘Say Yes’, for
example, the ending becomes ambiguous because readers are left unsure
of whether or not the wife does join the husband in bed. After a long
marriage, she has become someone he does not know at all and he no
longer knows what to expect (pp.206-10).
Some of the stories end with the main character gaining inspiration
from a musical sound. In ‘Our Story Begins’ Charlie hears a ship’s foghorn
and this enables him to imagine himself as somewhere else (p.292). In
‘The Rich Brother’, when a classical piece plays on his car cassette, Pete
is motivated to turn the car around and rescue his delinquent brother. The
music is the trigger to his realisation that he cannot abandon him (p.322).
Wolff’s endings do not necessarily nicely round off a story. They bring
readers to a point of contemplation or experience about the ordinary lives
7