Wolff begins this section with the simple declarative sentence: "Chuck got drunk almost every night." This sets the tone and shows us bad Chuck, the Chuck that threw himself against "unyielding objects" (237). Jack (aka Toby), the narrator, puzzles about the two personalities Chuck has and prepares us for what the bad Chuck is going to do first by describing him as a kind and affectionate person (240). Wolff’s actual physical description of him is done with such clear insight; he appears like an angel:
Milky skin with a wintry spot of red on each cheek. Yellow hair that turned white in sunshine. Wide forehead. He also had his mother's pale blue eyes and her way of narrowing them when she listened, looking down at the floor and nodding in agreement with whatever you said. (240)
What you should pay attention to here is that his description is twofold: 1) he describes what his subject looks like in straightforward bursts of color, strong nouns and simple adjectives and no verbs; and, 2) he shows us a characteristic thing his subject does by comparing it to someone else's similar behavior--his mother's. The economy of this description is breathtaking. We not only see Chuck but his mother, the yin and the yang of the family.
The bad Chuck comes to the fore right after this section on 240 when they go off to steal the gas from the Welches. As Wolf builds this scene we see how doomed these boys are. They proceed to the Welches' house through a boggy field. Psycho, their friend, struggles to keep up: Jack says that he hears him "shout and rage behind us" (241).
When they get to the house and Chuck starts siphoning the gas, Jack's narration changes from past tense of "I watched the house" to something more immediate, descriptive/reflective: "I had never been here before, but I knew the Welch boys from school. There were three of them, all sad, shabbily dressed . . . " (emphasis added 241). At the end of the paragraph we are returned to the past tense after hearing a story of Jack sparring with one of the Welch boys in PE. The function of the "here" is to put us in the scene beside Jack and there listen to his ruminations about the Welches. He puts us in the mud and we smell the gasoline. I take it that this "here" for Wolff is that timeless time that occurs every time after the Welches when he smells gasoline. He is immediately back in that muddy yard stealing gas from people who "weren't making it" (245).
So let's jump to the end of the Welch segment and think about why Jack doesn't apologize. It has something to do with “The Amen Corner” and the "damnation-dream" he has--the stop-action moment Wolff gives from his future self: "two Vietnamese women methodically hitting a discarded truck tire with sticks" (246). But it is also that Jack finally gets it. He finally gets how perverse he is.
At the beginning of the section he wants to go up to the Amen Corner in church but doesn't because he fears that Chuck will ridicule him and that Mr. Bolger, the preacher, "would see through me and and be disgusted" (239). Here in the aftermath of seeing Chuck apologize to Mr. Welsh, he can't bring himself to say he is sorry. He can't give himself a pass finally because he is that bad. He isn't resentfully bad but damnation bad. All he wants to do is get away. Wolff the writer does not give his boy Jack an out here. There is no redemption for him. There are no easy "sorries", no rationalizations based in feelings of "fear, or pity or disgust" (246). He could not walk up to the Amen Corner with Chuck and shout "I'm sorry." The reader would see through him and be disgusted. Such is the power of titles (i.e., The Amen Corner) if you let them resonate throughout your memoir.
"This Boy's Life" off-put me only once, and that section remains, after completion, my favourite part. It is the first entry following the "Citizenship at Home" heading, where Dwight & Jack schlock up the house's interior with white paint (pgs. 104-106). This is a legitimately insane thing to do, totally diagnosable. So, as it goes, Wolff's ma tells Dwight she's going to marry him and when she'll be movin' on up to the house. Dwight talks renovations, but does nothing except continue to booze. With only a few weeks left he brings home the white paint and proceeds, with earnest, to blanket the whole inside of the house. Dwight assesses its relative goodness, YHWH-style, and he and Jack continue on, slathering the furniture as well.
ReplyDeleteDwight has chosen the simplest means; he has chosen not to fix, or add, or improve, but to cover and conceal, whitewashing the past. When they got to the black walnut piano, I went, "Oh, no, no...," and I heard the soft, bristly strokes as Hitchcockian curdles played against a quiet night. The piano was the last thing to stand out, and, after a good spackling, reduced background detail and environment to a non-factor, making these characters and their individual miseries the only things to actually stand out.
One of the most memorable starts to a chapter I have read is the beginning of "A Whole New Deal" when Wolff describes the beaver incident. Dwight and Jack are driving and Dwight swerves into a beaver, killing it. Jack says, "Dwight said he swerved to miss the beaver, but that wasn't true" (87). Wolff describes this as being a pretty traumatic event for him, as he couldn't even pick it up after they stopped. Dwight tells him, "Pick it up. We'll skin the sucker out when we get home" (88). Jack replies to this saying, "I wanted to do what Dwight expected me to do, but I couldn't. I just stood there staring at the beaver" (88).
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of a similar incident I faced when I was younger. My friend swerved and hit a turtle on our way back from fishing; he said it was an accident but I knew it wasn't true. Being a animal and reptile lover, I was disgusted with him but I didn't want to look "soft" and wanted to impress him kind of, so I didn't make a big deal of it. It's funny when we are trying to impress people and get them to like us we will sometimes act differently then we usually do. In both incidents, myself and Jack are pretty horrified by what we saw, but, wanting the approval of the people we were with, we dealt with the situation and tried to forget about it. Like Jack says, "I still felt bad about being afraid of the beaver, and I didn't want to get in more trouble. I just wanted everything to go right" (89).
I find the scene of Dwight hitting the beaver very important and memorable as well. I think this is a perfect example of Wolff putting his audience into the mind of his younger self. This event characterizes Dwight, and we see him as a rude and selfish and immature man without Wolff ever saying any of those things. At the end of the chapter, in the second altercation with Dwight, we see this again in the self-righteous way Dwight attacks Wolff's innocent teasing behind his back.
DeleteThen in the last few lines of the section read,
"You're in for a change, mister. You got that? You're in for a whole nother ball game."
I braced myself for the next curve.
Taken with the title, "A Whole New Deal" The reader sees that Wolff is getting the short end of the stick. He is taking emotional abuse from Dwight, which he characterizes through the two main brief, but powerful, scenes.
The section that interested me was the Amen section (283-288), the ending of the memoir. I like how Wolff wraps everything up in an episodic fashion. I also found it interesting how Wolff uses short, declarative sentences. Describing his time at Hill, he starts off with the declarative sentence, "I did not do well at Hill." About a paragraph or two later, after leaving Hill, Wolff says, "Then I went into the army." It's another simple, declarative sentence. He doesn't describe his reasoning behind joining the army, except that he knows he'll be comfortable there. While he doesn't go into any details of his experiences, he says that the army is "where I might still redeem myself. All I needed was a war. Careful what you pray for." That last sentence, short and powerful, implies that his war experiences were rough.
ReplyDeleteThe section, and book, ends with Wolff and Chuck driving home from Seattle. This scene takes place before Wolff meets up with his brother and father and goes to Hill. While Wolff admits that him and Chuck aren't friends anymore, they have reasons to be happy - Chuck escaped jail and marriage and Wolff will soon join his family and go to a "noble" school. While they don't know what the future will bring, they feel "saved." While most of the memoir is bleak, it ends with positive imagery; two friends drinking and driving in the countryside singing hymns and songs together, feeling, for a moment, at peace with their lives. However, as we know from the beginning of the section, it'll keep getting complicated for Wolff. Though he felt saved at that moment with Chuck, he does poorly in school and decides to join the army in hopes to redeem himself.
I think another segment in the book that closely connects with the section on the "amen corner" is the section in which Toby goes to his first confessional at church, starting on page 17. To begin there is an understanding mentor/religious figure, Sister James, who attempts to steer Toby in the right direction, a situation where Toby cannot fully "repent" for his actions, and a symbol that represents how/why he cannot, and will not, tell the truth.
ReplyDeleteBoth sections, especially the confessional scene, start with in depth descriptions and the question "How will I/How can I tell the truth?" (and ultimately make a sacrifice). In this situation, Toby attempts to figure out what he will talk about at confession. At first he freezes up, but after Sister James tells him about her mischievous past he decides to take the easy way out of confession and just use the Sister's confession instead. Toby does this as well in the "amen corner" when he doesn't know how to answer the Father's questions and simply couldn't apologize to the Welch family, so instead takes the easy way out and decides to leave his problems behind by joining the Army. Another key point to look at in both is how badly he cares about the opinions of others'. He refuses to step up to the amen corner for fear of being seen as a liar who doesn't belong, and he refuses to tell the truth in confessional so he isn't judged too harshly by the priest; Toby always looks for the easy route (which ironically turns into the difficult route when he enters the Army). Lastly, the organization of each account is quite similar: reflection, mischievous action, more reflection, (useless) advice from religious mentor, Toby lies/beats around the bush with answers followed by more reflection. This kind of set up is crucial for how he eventually figures out what he wants to do with his young, at the time, life.
I'm not sure if the Amen section sticks with me because it's what I read last or because Wolff's powers of description and coherence are so beautifully displayed (probably both). He opens up on page 283 with two paragraphs that describe an incident involving himself and a friend of his father who professed feelings of love. That seems like a substantial memory to cover in two paragraphs. But Wolff manages to tell us all we need to know with concise language. "One morning I woke up to find this man embracing me and making declarations of love" (283). That sentence alone puts the reader in his shoes. We understand his shock and most likely his disorientation on that morning. We also get a further glimpse into his father's irrational behavior when his father instructs him to shoot the man upon return. This, of course, is unnecessary considering Toby got the man out of the house to call his father in the first place. In the last sentence concerning this issue Wolff uses simple yet concise language to illustrate the mindframes of his Toby character and his hopeful lover by saying, "That night the man leaned against the apartment door and sobbed while I stood in the darkness on the otherside, silently hugging the rifle, shaking and sweating as in a fever" (283-284). Not only do we see the scene, we feel it as well.
ReplyDeleteThe contrast of the last two sections nicely wrapped up the entire memoir. In "The Amen Corner," we see Toby at his (arguably) worst: He drinks with Chuck; he steals the gasoline and refuses to apologize; he comes to this realization that he is not sorry for the things he does. At the same time, Toby does not like this about himself. He can't handle the looks Mr. Bolger gives him or the discomfort of talking with Father Karl (249). I felt as though this was the section that the entire memoir was leading up to--the chance for him to make the decision of who he wanted to be. And then the "Amen" section came to this resignation. The last scene of Chuck and Toby driving back from Seattle, singing "as if [they'd] been saved" holds this sense of resignation. Toby has accepted that he will not be "saved" and he has embraced his choices and his way of life. This is even clearer when considering the title "Amen" of the last section. 'Amen' can be defined as "so be it." That's it. The end. In retrospect, I feel as though this is exactly what Wolff was leading up to--this final decision--even if he wasn't sure of that when he initially began to write his memoir.
ReplyDeleteFor myself, Citizenship in the Home part of the memoir was the best part. I believe this could be because I asked myself, "what would I have done?" There are many points in this section that there is a battle going on between Toby and various other characters, but the one that stood out to me the most, is the internal and external conflict/decision of going to France or not. When I first read this evolution in the memoir, I literally jumped out of shock. It seemed so out of place, I almost couldn't believe it, but then I realized that at this point, desperate times call for desperate measures.
ReplyDeleteAt this point of the adventures of Toby, we know is a conflicted individual, and the conflict arises even more when he needs to choose between leaving his mother behind and go to France and even change his identity, or stay in a very destructive household and be with his mother, whom has saved him multiple times. When I was given all of the details, I had to put the book down and contemplate what I would do. I sided with Toby. During this conflict, we of course hear from Dwight. Dwight was very eager to ship off Toby, most likely because he knew he could have his way with his mother, and it's no secret that Dwight strongly dislikes Toby. Dwight was of course his insensitive self and tried to persuade Toby to leaving claiming that "Well that's a lot of crap, because you've already changed you name once. Right?" (143), which obviously shows the eagerness and pull Dwight wants to make by making his argument valid.
I think that this section goes along with the last section "The Amen Corner", because we really get to see who he values more: himself or his mother? Is he as selfish as he comes off, or is he protective? Is Toby worried to go on life without his mother's manipulative ways, but yet he doesn't want her to get hurt by Dwight even more, especially since Dwight harms his mother (205-06). During this moment, we learn a lot about Toby as a man.
The change in tone you reference in "Amen Corner" reminds me of what I think is the most unnerving part of the book, the end of "A Whole New Deal" (89-91). For much of the section, Jack's narration is relaxed and contemplative. He is not necessarily excited about moving to Chinook, be he sees the possibilities in moving somewhere new and trying to start a new life, and build a new image. He also, so far, thinks Dwight is a nice enough. But then, when Dwight comes out of the tavern, all of that changes, including the narration style.
ReplyDeleteWhere before Jack was thinking to himself, he's suddenly in a "conversation" with Dwight, you one can call it that. The style is very direction, focusing on the verbs of driving, "gunned the car", "the care began to fishtail." The only description he gives to illustrate the darkness and the steepness of the cliffs they are on, in one line "The headlights slid off the road into darkness, then back again." The visceral impact of this passage, delivered as directly as possible with Dwight's intense questions and the knowledge he is drunk driving in such a destructive way, makes it so intense, especially with the quiet thought that game before that does not prepare you for Dwight's behavior.
One section of the book that struck me a lot was when Wolff describes his time in the Boy Scouts. I felt that this was important to Wolff because these boy scouts in his handbook were kind of shining examples of how men should behave. The handbook had a list of good deeds and a rating scale for the boys to ask themselves questions. I think the boy scouts were something for Wolff to aspire to. They were an example he never got from his father.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing about this section that struck me was how Wolff compared himself to the boy scouts in his handbook. He knows that these boys in the handbook are nothing like him, yet he is captivated by them. He goes into great detail about this. And yet he quickly admits they were nothing like him. I think Wolff was asking himself why these boys in the handbook captivated him so much.
"The Amen Corner" brings me back to when Toby is given his Winchester .22 rifle from Roy. Amen corner ends with Toby reflecting about himself and deciding to join the army. There are many allusions in the memoir that coincides with this and how he eventually joined the army. However, getting his rifle is the first sign of this. Wolff talks about how the camouflage jacket made him feel like a sniper and how he would close his blinds to make it more dark in his nesting position. My favorite quote from this section is, " Power can be enjoyed only when it is recognized and feared. Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it." After this is when he takes his first shot at the elderly couple because he his self-control is exhausted. Of course he shoots a squirel and has a very large amount of guilt over the event. Overall, I feel that this section is just the beginning of a whole new story for Toby and how much he has grown from this moment to where he is at the end of the memoir.
ReplyDeleteWhen you described the tonal shift that occurs in “The Amen Corner” I started to think about the passage where Wolff is describing how he felt powerful and feared when he pointed his .22 out of his living room window at his unsuspecting neighbors. At first Wolff claimed that he became irritated by innocence, yet after he shot and killed a squirrel he became emotionally distraught (pg. 25).
ReplyDeleteTo me the way that Wolff describes his emotional response and the way the tone shifts from being a narrative to being much more reflective and personal is an interesting way of presenting this scene. I was particularly interested in a quote near the end of this chapter when Wolff is surprised by Sister James visiting his home and he has a micro-identity crisis, “Being so close to so much robust identity made me feel the poverty of my own, the ludicrous aspect of my costume and props. I didn’t want to let her in. At the same time, strangely, I did” (pg. 28).