Analysis of “On Being A Real Westerner”

Also please complete the following assignment which is intended to address competency 3.5 (analyze the content, expression, and context of the writing).

Suspense can be defined as the tension created in a narrative when a reader becomes conscious of a conflict but does not know how it will be resolved. Good storytellers like writing process, Wolff has said that it is “part memory, part invention. I can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins. The very act of writing has transformed the original experience into another experience, more ‘real’ to me than what I started with.”
The story Wolff tells here is based on an actual experience that occurred when he was ten years old. He and his mother had just moved west from Florida to Salt Lake City, followed by Roy, his divorced mother’s boyfriend. “Roy was handsome,” Wolff writes, “in the conventional way that appeals to boys. He had a tattoo. He’d been to war and kept a silence about it that was full of heroic implication.

Solution

Being A Real Westerner

Analysis of “On Being A Real Westerner”

In every story there is a strong sense of conflict or struggle no matter what form it is. Through the suspenseful story, “On Being a Real Westerner,” Tobias Wolff uses the gun as a device to show his transformation from a boy to a man, and develops a theme of the power struggle within himself. Wolff also includes a heavy tone of suspense making people ask themselves what is going to happen next. Power takes over Tobias and how it controls his way of thinking from a little boy to a matured adult.

In the beginning of this tale we see Tobias as a young boy who strives to acquire this weapon that Roy give’s him. The young boy sees the weapon as something that completes him. The boy says, “A weapon was the first condition of self-sufficiency, and of being a real westerner”. Tobias Wolff wants to become something more than just a boy: a “real westerner”. The gun completes him and he had is heart set on it.

            His stepfather gives the gun to him, but his mother does not approve. She makes the boy promise that he will only take out the gun when she or his stepfather is there with him. The boy gets home from school everyday, earlier then his parents and on a regular basis he begins to take out the gun to clean it. He soon goes from simply cleaning the gun, to playing with it. He begins to dress up in his stepfather’s old army clothes, hold the gun, and look at himself in the mirror. He said, “The camouflage coat made me feel like a sniper, and before long I became one.”

All of a sudden one day, he goes on to playing with it by aiming the gun from his apartment window to people who are walking by on the street. Tobias starts making shooting sounds like kyoo! Next thing he found himself doing was cocking the hammer and letting it snap down. The young boy says that this gives him a sense of power; that he has control over these people that are walking by and they do not even know it. One day he could not fight the temptation. Tobias said “Power can be enjoyed only when it is recognized and feared. Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.” He is saying that he does not feel as powerful because the people walking have no clue is is there to fear him.

Tobias then got into his stepfather’s ammunition and loaded his gun up. He went to his normal window and he followed an old couple walking down the street with the aim of his gun, and once they made the corner, he cocked and aimed his gun at the tree above them, and killed a squirrel. The squirrel fell out of the tree onto the street. When his mother got home, he told her that there was a dead squirrel out in the street and they gave the squirrel a burial. He did not tell his mother that he had killed the squirrel. He was very upset by the sight of the dead animal and began to crying himself to sleep that night.

He eventually stopped crying and knelt down on the side of his bed and tried to pray. He tried so hard to pry and feel remorse for killing the squirrel but he did not. He got off the floor and got into bed with a smile on his face. After that day, he began to not go to the apartment after school when he knew he would be there alone. He also knew that one day he would have to fight that same temptation again. Tobias says, “All my images of myself as I wished to be were images of myself armed. Because I did not know who I was, any image of myself, no matter how grotesque, had power of me.” Tobias did not see himself without having a gun. A gun is what makes Tobias be Tobias. The gun completes him and makes him happy.

Through the suspenseful tale, “On Being a Real Westerner,” Tobias Wolff uses the gun as a device to show his transformation from a boy to a man, and develops a theme of power struggle within himself. Wolff includes a heavy tone of suspense making people ask themselves what is going to happen next. Power takes over himself and how it controls his way of thinking from a little boy to a matured adult.