Character

Tobias Wolff begins his story by stating, “I didn’t come to Utah to be the same boy I’d been before. I had my own dreams of transformation” (Wolff 8). Here, Wolff introduces himself as the main character, Jack, and begins to tell of his childhood ambition to transform not just himself, but the world around him.

A driving force that contributes Jack’s need for transformation is his feelings of guilt. From a young age, Jack is faced with guilt as he attends Catholic school. When discussing an early figure in his life, Sister James, he laments, “To her I was just another boy doing some dumb boyish thing. But I began to feel that she knew all about me, and that a good part of her life was now given over to considering how bad I was” (12). Although Sister James is unlikely to have a personal vendetta against Jack, his child-like point of view shows that he is paranoid by his guilty conscience. Though Jack tries to face his troubles, he explains, “Trying to get a particular sin out of it was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you’ve snagged the bottom, that you have the whole planet on the other end of your line” (17). Wolff includes a tone of hopelessness as he feels that as he tries to take hold of his sin, he feel more weighed down by his guilt.

This feeling of guilt continues to follow Jack, even as he moves into a new family. While Jack tells of his family troubles, he explains, “Dwight thought most of these troubles were my fault. And a lot of them were. I screwed up constantly, even when I meant to do well” (112). Wolff again employs a negative and guilty tone as Jack attempts to transform himself and “do well,” while he is being accused of causing trouble and feeling guilty himself. Jack’s harsh stepfather, Dwight, causes Jack a large amount of guilt, which leads to Jack’s final transformation away from his feelings of incompetency. Wolff relates, “I defined myself by opposition to [Dwight]. In the past I had been ready, even when innocent, to believe any evil thing of myself. Now that I had grounds for guilt I could no longer feel it” (134). What it takes for Jack to overcome his guilt is a change in his point of view. Once he realizes that he was innocent before, and once he has been pushed so far, Jack changes his submissive, guilty qualities, and grows through his embrace of rebellion.