Old School Tobias Wolff Summary

The Untruthful Truth: The Story of Non-Writer

Imagine a writer who never shares his writing and who represents fiction as non-fiction. Imagine a young man who wants to be a writer so much that he believes his own "lies." In Tobias Wolff's novel _Old School_, the author poses an ethical dilemma to the reader concerning issues of personal identity and honor. Taking place at a preparatory school in the 1960s, the unnamed narrator struggles with moral issues that surround the development of his authentic self. His desperate desire to win the school's literary contest to meet the famous author Ernest Hemingway results in the narrator's singular experience of plagiarizing another writer's short story. Throughout the novel, Wolff demonstrates that
Although not religious, the narrator's ignorance about his Jewish heritage is a significant factor in his later mental breakdown. For example, when the narrator whistles a Nazi marching song, he is truly clueless about how offensive it is. After hearing it is a racist song, he "starts to weep -- to blubber. [His] lack of control mortified [him]" (21). The narrator's strong reaction indicates that his identity is broken and he has no idea how to "fix" himself. Not understanding his own ethnic identity leads the narrator on a lost journey for his true self. At the same time, not understanding his roots makes it easier for him to deny his own identity and to adopt instead the mainstream persona of a typical prep school boy. However, the narrator's confusion about his place in the world sets him adrift in life. His later delusion then becomes a game of self-protection, where he subconsciously seeks to mask his own trauma to himself. Overall, not accepting his Jewish ethnicity parallels his inability to accept his own writing. He becomes the "perfect" self-hating protagonist, whose biggest barrier is literally