Yash Gupta
Alex Mouw
18 October 2015
Old School - Tobias Wolff
Textual Analysis
Set in an elite school in an elite school in the north east, a place of wealth, tradition and calculated nonchalance.
It’s extremely similar to an old european atmosphere just as the United States was coming out of the phase of the second world war and into a much freer time.
Tobias wolff resembles the Narrator in many ways. Wolff grew up in the North west and later came east to attend the Hill School, a boy’s boarding school in Pennsylvania. It should be noted however, that the events in the novel ‘Old School’ are imaginary. and are a work of fiction rather than a straight up autobiography. Wolff suggests at some points in the book that the narrator was actually
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One could easily attest to the fact that Tobias Wolff was actually taking his experiences at the Hill School in Pennsylvania into account when he wrote this book. This is probably why the rhetorical devices in this book are so vivid and clear.
Wolff manages to capture the environment of this “Old European styled school” and the life inside this school extremely well. Old school describes a teenager’s struggle to find his true honest self. In many ways, The narrator, who craves friendship and acceptance among his friends and classmates, is an outsider to this privileged environment, as he comes in as a “Scholarship Student”. So much so, that he tries to hide the fact that he is a scholarship student from his colleagues.
He is clearly an outsider in a manner that he is not from the east coast, his father is jewish, and that makes him self conscious. When the author discovers that he is jewish, he conceals his background from is classmates in fear of jeopardising his hard earned position in his delicate social
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When you compare that to the other students at the school, who are so privileged that they don’t even need schooling to reach the top. So, even if he was not Jewish, he would’ve already been considered a lower class student in front of these over-privileged kids. The one thing that did unite these different classes was: their love and respect for literature.
Most of the characters in the book, not just the narrator, are literary fanatics. Like his classmates, he has an undying love for writing and learning about his writing idols, he even helps edit the school’s literary magazine.
The most important aspect of the story that we are introduced to, is the “Literary Contest”. In this contest, the students are given the opportunity of a life-time to get a one on one interview with a highly acknowledged and critically acclaimed writer: from Robert frost and Ernest Hemingway to Ayn Rand. For this, the contestants had to submit a piece of writing that would be selected by one of these renowned writers. The narrator cared deeply about this competition as he says,
“I’m not exaggerating the importance of these trophy meetings. We cared. And I cared as much as anyone because I not only read writers, I read about
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