On Being A Real Westerner

The adult individual is oftentimes defined by a childhood image of himself so that even if he tries to move away or diversity his personality, the old personality still emerges again and again so that ultimately it becomes hard to lie to the self. Furthermore, genius cannot regret superstars childhood or past as much as one cannot bring them back and change what happened. The individual is only left to deal with what has become of him because of his experiences during childhood. These truths are what Woolf imparts to the commentator in his essay, On Being A Real Westerner.He explicitly states this idea in the final weaken when he confesses that all my images of myself as I wished to be were images of myself armed. Because I did not know who I was, whatever image of myself, no matter how grotesque had power over me. But the man can rejoin no help to the boy, not in this matter nor in those that follow. The complete essay focuses on a single experience which the writer belie ves defined him doneout life. This was the moment when he assumed the image of a rifle-toting Westerner. The introductory paragraph begins the story the day when the cause receives the rifle.The introduction hooks the reader who likes action in his stories because it presents the image of a little boy and a rifle. One would get intrigued as to what a young boy would do with a rifle and sense a foreboding tragedy coming on. Wolff follows through the episode with chronological scenes, as events happened from the time his br other gave him the Winchester rifle to the time he succumbed to the burning inclination to pull the trigger and experience some(prenominal) the pleasure and guilt of killing a living affaire even if it is only a squirrel.This single experience is narrated through a series of eight separate cut-scenes Roy gives him the rifle but his mother asks him to give it back his mother eventually relents afterwards much convince and cajoling the author is cleaning the rifle and then marching around the house with it era dressed in Roys army uniform he is crouched by the drawn shades, following the people on the channel and pretending to shoot he takes some real bullets, loads the rifle and practices cocking he pulls the trigger and kills a squirrel he tells his mother about the dead squirrel and he helps her bury it and, lying in bed at night while thinking about what he had done earlier. Presenting these series of images cued by phrases like after a few days or for a week moves the story along and makes the reader realize that the child grows up emotionally through the succession of scenes until the final realization of what that episode in childhood has affected him in life.It is notable to mention one scene that sticks out in the sense that it dialog about a different time, that of the author as a grown-up and herding Vietnamese prisoners during the war. This one paragraph introduced halfway through the narrative makes the reader understa nd that the story being narrated refers to the authors past. The only other time when this point is reiterated is during the last paragraph. Except for these two instances, the entire essay is a narrative of a single experience in the authors childhood. The mention of the Vietnam War scene is included for the author to illustrate the feeling of how it is like to hold a rifle but not to use it.According to him, some(prenominal) as a child and as an adult with a rifle aimed at others, the satisfaction is to call for these people being aimed at to be aware that they are facing the possibility of death so that they might fear the power of the one holding the rifle. He inserts the image of him as a grown-up while describing the analogous act being done by himself as a child, for the reader to compare the similarities of both images. Both the child and the man holding a rifle are supposed to evoke the same emotions on the part of the reader, further reiterating the theme of the essay. The concluding paragraph summarizes for the reader the meaning and purpose of the entire narrative. The boy has become a man but somehow, he has not been able to shake come to the childhood image of himself as a rifle-toting Westerner.