The Displaced Aristocrat as Tragic Hero in Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life

In “The Amen Corner,” the penultimate section of his 1989 memoir, This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff recounts at length one of the most shameful episodes from his dreary midteen years, having first narrated how he survived a Dickensian adolescence in small-town Washington under the constant surveillance of his irrational step-father, Dwight, and how he counterfeited documents that ultimately secured his acceptance to the Hill School, an elite institution back East among whose inhabitants he felt he rightly belonged. “When I was growing up in the world of This Boy’s Life,” Wolff later told the Paris Review, “I was never responsible for anybody being hurt in an enduring way. My mistakes mainly hurt me” (Livings 77). Yet in his book’s climactic sequence, the author’s younger self and some drunken friends siphon gasoline from the truck of a neighboring farm family, the Welches, causing serious damage to the victims’ psyches, according to the narrator’s own assessment. Returning the next day to the dilapidated farmhouse, ostensibly to apologize (which he refuses to do) and make amends (only because a trail of muddy footprints plainly establishes his guilt), Toby Wolff begins the exceedingly long process of recognizing and finally acknowledging the lamentable behavior of his youth—a process that remains incomplete until he publishes this memoir. “These people weren’t making it,” the middle-aged author recalls about the precarious financial situation of the Welches. “They were near the edge, and I had nudged them that much further along. Not much, but enough to take away some of their margin.” Restoring the gasoline was of little consequence, it turns out. “The real harm was in their knowing that someone could come upon them in this state, and pause to do them injury,” explains the author. “It had to make them feel small and alone, knowing this—that was the harm we had done. I understood some of this and felt the rest” (245–46).

Asked in 1996, at age fifty-one, whether he, an “incredibly stable” person by then, sensed a midlife crisis coming on, Wolff replied, “I had mine when I was in my teens. That was my mid life crisis” (Homes 17). But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, while stuck residing in the company town of Chinook, Washington, and attending high school in neighboring Concrete, Wolff could only vaguely feel the harm he regularly caused others: he didn’t yet fully understand the moral ramifications of his premature midlife crisis. The paragraphs of the memoir wherein the teenager partially registers the Welch family’s suffering therefore cannot be said to constitute a legitimate recognition scene in the classic tragedy that was Wolff’s childhood and adolescence—that is, the tragedy in This Boy’s Life. True, much of the narrator’s suffering is self-inflicted, the language used in this penultimate section of the memoir is ominous, and the placement of this passage immediately prior to the book’s brief conclusion suggests the material is just as critical to the work’s overall design as a proper recognition scene would be to a tragedy. But the gasoline-siphoning incident does not mark an end to Toby’s misbehavior: he subsequently steals and pawns several guns, a pair of binoculars, and a hunting knife belonging to his stepfather, and he prolongs his successful charade as an ideal prep-school candidate, even accepting from a duped Hill School alumnus the gift of a tailored wardrobe critical to assuming the role of an East Coast gentleman. In other words, his is not the contrite behavior of a tragic hero chagrined by his own poor decision-making. Oedipus, upon realizing that the dreaded prophecy given to him at Delphi has been fulfilled, does not return to his incestuous marriage bed, nor does Creon continue to deny his disloyal nephew a proper burial, once he recognizes the consequences of his own poor judgment. But the narrator of This Boy’s Life remains on a path of delinquency and fraudulence subsequent to the incident at the Welches’ farm until...