Old School centers on an unnamed narrator who begins his final year at an elite New England prep school in 1960. During this school year, the narrator tries to enhance his social standing among his classmates, often by lying about himself and his home life. The narrator even plagiarizes another student’s story in order to win a school literary competition, violating the school’s Honor Code. When these deceptions are revealed, the narrator is immediately expelled from the school and loses all of his friends. With this, the book emphasizes the value of honesty and honor and shows that without them, a person risks losing everything.
The narrator lies about who he is. Unlike most boys, the narrator attends the school on scholarship, and his father has a Jewish background—and he keeps both of these things a secret from his peers. Although the school prides itself on being egalitarian, the narrator worries that if he reveals these aspects of his identity, he won’t fit in as well with his classmates. He’s likely correct about this, since openly Jewish students at his school seem to stand out. The narrator describes how, for years, he “had hidden [his] family in calculated silences and vague hints and dodges.” As a result, he feels that although he is well-liked at the school, none of his friends know him very well. Omitting information about his life cuts the narrator off from close relationships.
Eventually, the narrator’s dishonesty about his personal life and his work costs him his place at school, as well as his friendships—a harsh punishment that illustrates the severe cost of dishonesty. When the school holds a literary contest, the narrator finds a story in an old literary magazine written by a student from a nearby girls’ school called Miss Cobb’s. He retypes the story and changes the main character’s name to his own, then submits it for the competition. Ironically, he plagiarizes the story because he really recognizes himself in the protagonist and feels that the story speaks honestly to his own experience—particularly as the protagonist is from a middle-class background and lies about her Jewish heritage. He even thinks, “Anyone who read[s] this story [will] know who [he is],” referring to the fact that he will finally be more open about his identity through the story’s details. On some level, the narrator understands the value of being honest about his life, even while he acts dishonestly. When the story is published, Bill, the narrator’s Jewish roommate, criticizes him for implying that he is Jewish and trying to write about the experience of a Jewish student. The irony is that the narrator actually does have a Jewish background, but he’s been successfully lying to his friends for so long that his attempt to be open about this is interpreted as deception. This costs him his friendship with Bill. Later, when the school discovers the narrator’s plagiarism, he is expelled for breaking the Honor Code. He never speaks to his friends again, and Columbia University withdraws his acceptance when the headmaster tells the university what the narrator did. Without honor and integrity, the narrator loses both his personal relationships and the bright future he was working toward.
The narrator later attempts to reconcile many of the missteps that he made in school, demonstrating his recognition that honesty and honor are necessary to a successful life. After being expelled and working odd jobs for a few years, the narrator decides to enlist in the military. He explains that joining the army is “an expectation [he has] for [him]self,” implying that serving in the military is important to him—likely because it is a way for him to regain the honor that he lost at school. The narrator also chooses to apologize to the girl whose story he stole, Susan Friedman. He sends her a note and meets her for lunch, where he comes clean about what he did. The narrator also thanks her for writing a story that is so “brave and honest.” In apologizing to and openly admiring Susan, the narrator recognizes the value of integrity and tries to emulate Susan’s courage and honesty. These actions enable the narrator’s success: he eventually becomes a successful writer and is even invited back to the school as one of its visiting authors, placing him in the company of Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, and Ayn Rand. By rectifying his mistakes and trying to be more honest, the narrator is then able to return to the school as an honorable person.
The value of honesty is reinforced in the final chapter of the novel, which switches focus to the dean of the school, Dean Makepeace. For years, many students believed that was close friends with Ernest Hemingway. But on the day the narrator is expelled, the dean explains to the headmaster that he has never actually met Hemingway but never corrected the students’ beliefs. He feels that he, too, has been deceptive and has broken the Honor Code, and so he decides to resign from the school. With this, Dean Makepeace both admits his dishonesty and is able to regain some honor, as he openly admits his mistake and essentially punishes himself. Then, when he asks to return to the school a year later, the headmaster welcomes him with open arms. In a way, this mirrors the narrator’s journey: deceiving others causes both men to lose everything, but being honest enables them to return to the school honorably.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Honesty and Honor ThemeTracker
Honesty and Honor Quotes in Old School
I thought writing should give me pleasure, and generally it did. But I didn’t enjoy writing this poem. I did it almost grudgingly, yet in a kind of heat too. Maybe it was good, maybe not. Maybe it wasn’t even a poem, only a fragment of a story in broken lines. I couldn’t tell. It was too close to home. It was home: my mother gone; my father, though no fireman, wounded by my disregard as I was appalled by his need; the mess, the noise, the smells, all of it just like our place on a Saturday morning; the sense of time dying drop by drop, of stalled purpose and the close, aquarium atmosphere of confinement and repetition. I could hear and see everything in that apartment, right down to the pattern in the Formica tabletop. I could see myself there, and didn’t want to. Even more, I didn’t want anyone else to.
I submitted the elk-hunter poem. “Red Snow,” I called it.
I blamed Ayn Rand for disregarding all this. And I no doubt blamed her even more because I had disregarded it myself—because for years now I had hidden my family in calculated silences and vague hints and dodges, suggesting another family in its place. The untruth of my position had given me an obscure, chronic sense of embarrassment, yet since I hadn’t outright lied I could still blind myself to its cause. Unacknowledged shame enters the world as anger; I naturally turned mine against the snobbery of others, in the present case Ayn Rand.
By now I’d been absorbed so far into my performance that nothing else came naturally. But I never quite forgot that I was performing. In the first couple of years there’d been some spirit of play in creating the part, refining it, watching it pass. There’d been pleasure in implying a personal history through purely dramatic effects of manner and speech without ever committing an expository lie, and pleasure in doubleness itself: there was more to me than people knew!
All that was gone. When I caught myself in the act now I felt embarrassed. It seemed a stale, conventional role, and four years of it had left me a stranger even to those I called my friends.
The whole thing came straight from the truthful diary I’d never kept: the typing class, the bus, the apartment; all mine. And mine too the calculations and stratagems, the throwing over of old friends for new, the shameless manipulation of a needy, loving parent and the desperation to flee not only the need but the love itself. Then the sweetness of flight, the lightness and joy of escape. And, yes, the almost physical attraction to privilege, the resolve to be near it at any cost: sycophancy, lies, self-suppression, the masking of ambitions and desires, the slow cowardly burn of resentment toward those for whose favor you have falsified yourself. Every moment of it was true.
I didn’t want to lose my place in the circle, so of course I was afraid of what my schoolmates would think after reading “Summer Dance.”
My fears came to nothing. Masters and boys alike told me pretty much what George had said—with plain goodwill and something else, something like relief, as if they’d felt all along that I was holding back, and could breathe easier now that I’d spoken up.
Now they sounded different to me. The very heedlessness of their voices defined the distance that had opened up between us. That easy brimming gaiety already seemed impossibly remote, no longer the true life I would wake to each morning, but a paling dream.
Arch began to explain. He wasn’t used to talking about himself, and did it clumsily, but he tried to make the headmaster understand. This boy had laid false claim to a story, whereas he himself had laid false claim to much more—to a kind of importance, to a life not his own. He had been in violation of the Honor Code for many years now and had no right to punish lesser offenders, especially this one, who’d been caught up in a hysteria for which Arch held himself partly responsible.
I’m kicking myself out, he said. That’s my last act as dean.
