Powder By Tobias Wolff Summary

“Powder” is the story of an unnamed boy’s coming-of-age, framed by a father and son ski trip and shadowed by an impending divorce. Wolff uses the son’s initiation of conversation late in the story both to signal the son’s maturation and as a commentary on the importance of trust in familial relationships and letting go of fears about the future. Throughout the story, the son is put in situations outside of his comfort zone - specifically situations where he cannot see ahead far enough, literally or figuratively, to plan the outcome - as a result of his father’s actions and his trust, or lack thereof, in his father. The turning point in these comparisons happens when the son finally acquiesces to the father’s unspoken pleas for a truce and goes along with the conversation. The first two times he is not able to plan, the son is clearly extremely uncomfortable: “By now I couldn’t see the trail […] I stuck to [the father] like white on rice […] and somehow made it to the bottom,” and “The lay of the road behind us had been marked by our own tracks, but there were no tracks ahead of us […] to keep my hands from shaking I clamped them between my knees.” This establishes planning as his somewhat childlike need for security in unfamiliar places - no matter where he is or what he is doing, he tries to plan for as many outcomes as possible. Consequently, when the father repeatedly places him in situations where he cannot plan or see at all before the son has learned to trust him, he feels as if he has no safety net. As the journey goes on, he begins to trust that his father knows what he’s doing, both with their
Wolff uses the son’s initiation of conversation late in the story both to signal the son’s maturation and as a commentary on the importance of trust in familial relationships and letting go of fears about the