Caring yet Careless

Tobias Wolff’s short story “The Rich Brother” is about two brothers who are very different from each other but must get along because of Donald’s inevitable dependence on Pete. Pete is responsible, hard-working, and modestly successful. He is married, has two daughters, a career, a house, and a boat. On the other hand, Donald is unreliable, dependent on others, and not successful at all. He does not have a stable job, is single, and lives by himself. After trying out a few different religions and churches, Donald decides to commit to a particular church and move to a farm where members of the faith community live and work together. Everyone who is living on the farm is assigned chores daily, and sometimes Donald has the responsibility of grocery shopping and cooking dinner for the entire community. The majority of the story takes place in Pete’s car right after he picks Donald up from the church farm because he has recently been expelled from the community. Donald has a few character traits that contradict each other. Throughout the story, Donald is very caring and generous, but he is also extremely gullible and irresponsible. These two character traits work against him to create an ongoing recipe for disaster in his life and in his relationship with his brother, Pete.
Donald clearly wants to do what is right, and he seems to genuinely care about others, but he is not able to discern when it is the appropriate time for an act of kindness. One day, after going grocery shopping, when he is on his way back to the farm that he is living at with his church community, he meets a poor family with eight children, so he decides to give them all of the groceries that he was supposed to use to cook dinner that night. This would have...

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... lying; consequently, Donald’s irresponsible action invites conflict between the two brothers.
Donald is unable to take care of himself and, therefore, constantly dependent on others. By the end of the story it is painfully obvious that Donald is never going to change. Pete realizes this and eventually accepts the responsibility of caring for his brother even though he is not required to do so. Verbalizing this realization he says to Donald, “You won’t pay me back. You can’t. You don’t know how. All you’ve ever done is take. All your life” (664). This is an interesting statement because Donald exhibits generosity throughout the story, but it seems as though he is generous and caring toward everyone except for his brother, Pete.
The two most obvious contradictory character traits of Donald, generosity and thoughtlessness, are the cause of much tension in the story.