This Boy's Life by Tobias WolffMark Twain once said, "We are creatures of external influence - we are the originators of nothing." Whenever we adopt a new line of thought and drift toward a new line of belief and action, the impulse is always suggested from without. » In the memoir This Boy's Life, by Tobias Wolff, Jack shows himself to be an externally influenced creature. 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 everything his friends do. When he lived in Seattle with his mother, his new friends pushed him to do bad things. His friends, Silver and Terry, were children with no one to discipline them. They befriended Jack and together they caused a lot of trouble: “We broke the streetlights. We opened the doors of cars parked on the hills and released the emergency brakes so they crashed into the cars below…. And we flew” (61). This shows that even though Jack is good on the inside, he does everything his friends do. Later, when he...