Mark Twain once said, "We are creatures of outside influences -- we originate nothing within. Whenever we take a new line of thought and drift into a new line of belief and action, the impulse is always suggested from the outside." In the memoir This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff Jack shows that he is a creature of outside influence. Some examples of this are that he copies what his friends do, he doesn't try to shape his own life, and he is heavily influenced by the male figures in his life. Throughout this novel, Jack does whatever his friends do. When he was living in Seattle with his mother, he was influenced by his new friends to do bad things. His friends, Silver and Terry were kids with no one to discipline them. They befriended Jack and together they caused lots of trouble, “We broke street lights. We opened the doors of parked cars on hills and released the emergency brakes so the smashed into the cars below…. And we stole”(61). This shows that although Jack is good on the inside, he does whatever his friends do. Later when he and his mom move to Concrete, he follows the same pattern. Although he says he wants to start over and be a good kid, he ends up getting bad friends. He starts ditching school more often, smokes and drinks, and his grades fall. To keep Dwight and his mom from finding out, he forges his grades. Jack does not shape his own life. Many times in the novel Jack imagines who he wants to be, and gives other people the impression that he's someone else, but he never tries to achieve anything to become what he imagines. Early on, he had a pen pal he wrote to, “We were supposed to write once a month but I wrote at least once a week, ten, twelve, fifteen pages at a time. I represented myself to her as the owner of a palomino horse named Smiley who shared my encounters with mountain lions, rattlesnakes, and packs of coyotes on my father’s ranch, the Lazy B”(13...
