Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Old School, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Honesty and Honor
Identity and Belonging
The Power of Literature
Competition, Masculinity, and Pride
Education, Failure, and Growth
Summary
Analysis
The day before the Frost poems are due, there is a fire at the school. Years earlier, a residential house had burned to the ground with 13 boys inside. The fire was supposedly started by a cigarette, which led to a harsh ban on smoking. If the boys were caught, they were expelled, no exceptions. Still, many boys continued to smoke, including the narrator. He describes that his true addiction was not to the cigarettes themselves, but to flouting the rules in the face of constant vigilance.
Here, Wolff introduces cigarettes as a symbol of the narrator’s coming of age journey. If a person is caught deceiving the faculty and smoking, they lose their place in the school and their friendships. The narrator’s willingness to partake in this deception, even at the potential cost of leaving the school, establishes his immaturity. The rules around the cigarettes also reinforce the idea that without honesty and integrity, a person can lose everything.
Themes
One day, the narrator almost got caught smoking. He was smoking in the basement of the chapel with another boy, and minutes after the narrator left, the boy was discovered and expelled. The narrator felt both guilty and grateful that he was able to remain at the school, and he collected his cigarettes and lighters and stuffed them into the trash, vowing to never smoke again.
When the narrator realizes the true stakes of smoking cigarettes, however, he understands that his deceptions are not worth it. To be successful at the school, he has to be honest and honorable—a mature realization for the narrator.
Themes
Thus, when the firefighters arrive that Sunday afternoon, the narrator assumes a cigarette started it. When they arrive, he is working on his poem in the library. It is a narrative poem about a hunter killing an elk. It falls into a pattern of several of his stories, which follow a young man named Sam who hunts and fishes and romances women in the Pacific Northwest. Over time, the narrator wrote the stories in the hopes that his classmates would assume he lived a life like Sam, as many of his friends knew little about his life in Seattle. Still, he’s not fully satisfied with this poem.
The narrator exhibits his desire to obscure his identity so that his classmates will like and accept him. He also recognizes that writing has the power to shape that identity. Yet the irony is that his stories are obviously false, and they only make his peers feel as though they don’t fully know him or his life.
Themes
When the narrator leaves the library, he sees a crowd gathered around the field house. No flames are visible, but a few shingles are burned. The narrator learns that Big Jeff started the fire. Big Jeff is a very friendly person, a vegetarian, and a scientist. He founded the Rocket Club, which meets at the football field on Sunday afternoons. Big Jeff created a two-stage rocket, but instead of going straight up, the rocket crashed into the field house roof and exploded. At dinner, Big Jeff becomes a celebrity for the fire. Later, Purcell tells the narrator that he wishes they kicked Big Jeff out: it bothers him that they’re always together.
Purcell’s frustration again emphasizes how even small aspects of the boys’ lives become competitions. The more popular Big Jeff becomes, the more Purcell feels that he lives in his cousin’s shadow.
Themes
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That night, the narrator writes a new poem, a narrative about a fireman the morning after a big blaze. The fireman a hero at his job, but when he comes home, he’s dissatisfied by the messiness and noisiness of his house and frustrated that his son dislikes him. Unusually, writing the poem gives the narrator no pleasure. He realizes that this is because the poem hits a little too close to home for him: his mother is gone, and his father is wounded by his disregard. The narrator realizes he doesn’t want anyone to read the poem and recognize him in it, and he submits the elk poem instead.
The narrator does have an impulse to write truthfully about his life, but he continues to be concerned about sharing such truthful writing—and, by extension, his true identity—with his peers. Fearing that the poem would make his personal dissatisfaction with his father too evident, the narrator instead submits the poem that makes his life seem rugged and adventurous. This decision to hide one poem and share another underscores that writing can be powerful because it can change how the narrator’s peers look at him.
Themes
