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Character Analysis Of This Boy's Life By Tobias Wolff

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From shooting squirrels to trying to run to Alaska, Tobias Wolff makes his memoir, This Boy’s Life, a truly captivating, and meaningful book. The book stars Toby Wolff a young boy, who struggles through his childhood and young adult years. Due to an unstable home life, and a variety of character flaws, Toby has a rough time doing what is ethically right, which often leads him meeting trouble later down the road, and throughout the book, he often makes seemingly erratic and irrational decisions that leave us all wandering. Even though Toby struggles and makes a plethora of mistakes throughout the memoir, his grit, persuasion, and unique perspective of the world, could work in his favor, if he chooses to clean up his act, illustrating that even the most unethical people have positive qualities.
Toby is a very flawed character because he lacks character and an identity. Throughout the memoir, Toby behaves dishonestly illustrating that I need to make a conscious decision in order to change. His dishonesty is often overlooked at home because of the lack of structure. When he first gets caught vandalizing a school bathroom he continues to lie to, “No ma’am” (82). Whenever Toby finds himself in a predicament where he has to explain himself, he almost always chooses to lie, which is a childish thing to do, but Toby continues this habit throughout the entire text. Toby often makes mistakes that are easily avoidable, which often out him in difficult situations where he is forced to

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