In This Boys Life, by Tobias Wolff, Wolff uses indexing, or references, to an easily recognizable event, to validate and further supplement the feelings or thoughts of his characters. Some of the types of indexing he uses are songs, references to historical and non-historical events, and vehicles that were in style. These are things that most, if not all, of his readers will recognize and associate with a certain type of feeling or action. One example of this is the song at the beginning. Mood Indigo is a song that describes the suffering of a man whose girl had left him. This is exactly the predicament that they left Roy, Tobias mothers old boyfriend, in. From a selection in the song, I always get that mood indigo, Since my baby said goodbye, And in the evening when the lights are low, Im so lonely I could cry.
This is probably how Roy is feeling at this point, having been deserted. A second example is the time in Seattle when the boys, Tobias, Terry Taylor, and Terry Silver, witness a Thunderbird in the streets below one of their houses. The narrator states that Thunderbirds had only been out for a year, which meant that they were all new. Thunderbirds were new, fast, and very cool. The author put this in to support the boys reason for vandalizing it. This car and owner was everything that they wanted to be, and every thing that they were not.
One look was enough to see that he [the owner] was everything we were not, his life a progress of satisfactions we had no hope of attaining in any future we could seriously propose for ourselves (Wolff 45-46).
The Review on Realism and Invention in the Stories of Tobias Wolff
Winging It: Realism and Invention in the Stories of Tobias Wolff Author(s): Martin Scofield Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 31, North American Short Stories and Short Fictions (2001), pp. 93-108 Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3509376 . Accessed: 08/10/2011 13:01 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of ...
This man is cool, they are not. So, thus, they are justified in egging the car and its occupant. The author uses the image of the Thunderbird to set the reader alongside the boys and against the driver of the Thunderbird. A third example of this is the boys watching The Mickey Mouse Club after school each day. It is used to show that Tobias is leading two lives. There is the one that he leads at home, the perfect one, the one that obeys rules and laws.
Then there is the one that he displays when he is around his friends. This one breaks laws, talks dirty, and is all around bad. When he is watching the Mickey Mouse Club, he shows both of them. There is his bad side, which is exposed at the beginning. This one is the one that talks dirty to Annette, the main character. Once they were done talking to her, they shut up and watched the show (Wolff 44).
They are actually kids underneath the hard shell. Thus Wolff uses indexing, or references to a commonly known event, to argue for and validate his characters. But what if a person has no clue what the book is talking about? What if the reader doesnt get what the author is trying to say? That is up to the reader..
