Character

Character

One of the more important characters in This Boy’s Life is Dwight, Jack’s stepfather who has an obsession with maintaining his own self-confidence and self-importance by making his primary goal in their household, to break down all those around him, primarily Jack and Rosemary Wolff. Towards the beginning of the Wolff family’s relationship with Dwight, he seemed like a kind and well-mannered mechanic from a rural town. While Dwight was visiting for one of the first times, Jack described him as being “very nice, very considerate” (63). This was one of the only times when Jack actually complemented Dwight, but even when he did his tone was somewhat half hearted and lacking very much force.

The show that Dwight had been putting on to win over Rosemary ended abruptly when Jack was riding up to Chinook with him and left the car on the way to get himself a drink at a tavern. When he returned he immediately confronted Jack with word he had heard about Jack being a “hotshot” in Seattle and told him “you pull that hotshot stuff around me and I’ll snatch you bald headed, you understand?” (91). He then followed that up with, “You’re in for a change, mister. You got that? You’re in for a whole nother ball game,” (91) all this while drunkenly speeding towards Chinook. This new reality for Jack brought on an extremely poor phase in his life when he was consistently beaten, tricked, and lied to by Dwight, who even went as far as to tell Jack that the money he made from his newspaper route would go to a separate bank account for the future, while he instead, spent it all on buying a small arsenal for his own hunting pleasure. Instead of being the new start that Jack and Rosemary had hoped for, Dwight became just another roadblock in the happy life that they had hoped for.