Short Story Literature Analysis: Tobias Wolffs Powder (Essay Sample)

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Short Story Analysis: Tobias Wolffs Powder
Tobias Wolff’s Powder is a story that goes into the intricacies of life bringing out the most inner precepts held by the society and making it come out so relevantly. The themes in most of the stories in the book, The Night in Question, are so relevant to human tendencies, and one of these is the coming of age and getting a personal identity that comes out so vividly in the short story termed, "Powder”. The story is straightforward and talks about a boy who is with his father on a ski trip. The story revolves a broken family, where the mother and father are separated, and the father has to take the kid on a ski trip so that he can return him home early for the Christmas dinner with the mom. From the father tarrying to the snow-filled road, to the risk, all show how the father is determined to impress the boy, just to relate to the son; but the twist focuses on the son getting identity rather than the relationship itself.
Here, there is a big picture developed to indicate how some fathers can go out of their way, just to show how much they would like to have their sons bond with them. The risks the father takes all indicate to the extent of the danger that the father is willing to go through so that he can make sure that the son makes it to the trip. Still, the danger and risk are silent communications to the son that at least, he can take a risk and still stay alive. First, instead of giving up, when he finds the road being guarded by a state trooper, he waits until the trooper goes and he risks traveling on the road that is all snow covered. From the onset, we see disaster ranging, moment after moment to the extent that worry carried in the narrator's voice explains what the mood of the journey is. While here the boy is only worried about the Christmas dinner, the father is worried about making sure that he delivers on his promise to the boy. He can risk for it, but the son is so uptight to think even of it.
One notable thing is the attitude of the boy. The worry does not come as if he cares about the trip more than he does about the ski trip. He is worried about failing the mom and going contrary to the sync and maybe failing the Christmas. Coming from the conversation, he seems to be the one who stays with the mother and yet when they are together with the father, when disaster strikes, he is thinking about the mother. This kind of indifference exists in most case scenarios. The boy is not the joyride, fun hogging type. He is the kind that won’t jump because the mother may have made him overcautious. The boy is passive, conservative, and overly controlling. He wants the father to do what he deems right. However, the father is the fearless type and one who would rather risk making a point. This is visible in the way he drives on snow. In explaining the behavior of the boy the author reports, "was a boy who kept his clothes on numbered hangers to ensure proper rotation. [He] bothered [his] teachers for homework assignments far ahead of their due dates so [he] could draw up schedules." (Wolff, 2010) The boy is the exact opposite of the father, and for him to enjoy the trip, he had to be at least able to come terms with the fearless nature of his very own father.
Still on the nature of these two, the father being careless would sneak his son into a bar even without the permission of the wife. At the moment, the obsessive, controlling behaviors may have been the only way that the son would express his disregard for the separation of the two yet the father kept making mistakes, and his overdaring nature made him all the more a target for mishaps and poor judgment and a master of pissing off the wife.
Now, away from the nature of these two. The father here wants, by all means to have his son ease up. At some point, he tells his son, "If you haven't driven fresh powder," he says at the end, "you haven't driven." Here, he tries to make the son ease up as he tries to make him, at least, less withdrawn and more eager to experience whatever the father was implying. In short, the father wanted the son to start enjoying the moment. By saying if you have not driven on the powder you have not driven yet, he wanted to show the son how normal the dangerous act he was doing was and in the process make the son enjoy. Well, this worked since, after some time, the son came to and started acting like he was enjoying the journey.
Just to stress a point, he the son knew what the father was doing. This takes the excerpt to the beginning of the story where the son talks of how the father had to fight to be able to have the privilege to take the son to the Mountian to ski. As the story begins, the narrator talks about the struggle to take the son to ski, "Just before Christmas my fathe...