Old School

by

Tobias Wolff

Dean Makepeace Character Analysis

Dean Makepeace is the dean of the narrator’s school. The narrator and his classmates believe that the dean is friends with Ernest Hemingway, having met him while serving in World War I. But in the book’s final chapter, the narrative shifts to Dean Makepeace’s perspective, and it’s revealed that the dean never actually knew Hemingway. The students’ belief arose from an unclear exchange, and over the years the untrue rumor became legend. However, the dean never corrects it, and so when the headmaster tells him that he has to expel the narrator for plagiarizing a story and breaking the school’s Honor Code, the dean feels that it would be hypocritical for him to do so. After all, he, too, has been breaking the Honor Code for years. He resigns that morning and doesn’t participate in the narrator’s expulsion. Like the narrator’s mistake, this failure becomes an opportunity for Dean Makepeace’s growth. Over the next year, he’s unable to find a job at another school and feels exceptionally lonely. He realizes how much he relies on literary conversation with the students and how his job gives him purpose. The dean humbly asks the headmaster for his position back, and the headmaster grants his request; he is welcomed back to the school with open arms. Dean Makepeace’s story parallels the narrator’s: both men lied and lost everything, but by becoming more honest, they are able to return to the school honorably.

Dean Makepeace Quotes in Old School

The Old School quotes below are all either spoken by Dean Makepeace or refer to Dean Makepeace. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Honesty and Honor Theme Icon
).
Chapter 5: Slice of Life Quotes

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.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Dean Makepeace, Ernest Hemingway, Ayn Rand
Page Number: 93
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10: Master Quotes

Arch was sick of these competitions. The headmaster had launched them years ago to encourage more boys to try their hand at writing, and at the time Arch had seen merit in the idea, but it soon palled on him. The scramble to win a private audience set them against one another and sanctioned the idea of writing as warfare by other means, with a handful of champions waving the bloody shirt over a mob of failed pretenders.

Related Characters: Dean Makepeace, The Headmaster
Page Number: 186
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Dean Makepeace (speaker), The Narrator, Ernest Hemingway, The Headmaster
Page Number: 187
Explanation and Analysis:

Up to the moment he resigned he must have imagined that teaching was a distraction from some greater destiny still his for the taking. Of course he hadn’t said this to himself, but he’d surely felt it, he later decided, because how else could he not have known how useless he would be thereafter? For thirty years he had lived in conversation with boys, answerable to their own sense of how things worked, to their skepticism, and, most gravely, to their trust. Even when alone he had read and thought in their imagined presence, made responsible by it, enlivened and honed by it. Now he read in solitude and thought in solitude and hardly felt himself to be alive.

Related Characters: The Narrator, Dean Makepeace
Page Number: 189-190
Explanation and Analysis:

Arch stopped and looked down the garden to where the headmaster stood by the drinks table with another master. The headmaster said, Late for his own funeral! and everyone laughed, then he put his glass down and came toward Arch with both hands outstretched. Though the headmaster was the younger man, and much shorter, and though Arch was lame and had white hairs coming out of his ears and white stubble all over his face, he felt no more than a boy again—but a very well-versed boy who couldn’t help thinking of the scene described by these old words, surely the most beautiful words ever written or said: His father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him.

Related Characters: The Headmaster (speaker), The Narrator, Dean Makepeace
Page Number: 195
Explanation and Analysis:
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Dean Makepeace Quotes in Old School

The Old School quotes below are all either spoken by Dean Makepeace or refer to Dean Makepeace. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Honesty and Honor Theme Icon
).
Chapter 5: Slice of Life Quotes

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.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Dean Makepeace, Ernest Hemingway, Ayn Rand
Page Number: 93
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10: Master Quotes

Arch was sick of these competitions. The headmaster had launched them years ago to encourage more boys to try their hand at writing, and at the time Arch had seen merit in the idea, but it soon palled on him. The scramble to win a private audience set them against one another and sanctioned the idea of writing as warfare by other means, with a handful of champions waving the bloody shirt over a mob of failed pretenders.

Related Characters: Dean Makepeace, The Headmaster
Page Number: 186
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Dean Makepeace (speaker), The Narrator, Ernest Hemingway, The Headmaster
Page Number: 187
Explanation and Analysis:

Up to the moment he resigned he must have imagined that teaching was a distraction from some greater destiny still his for the taking. Of course he hadn’t said this to himself, but he’d surely felt it, he later decided, because how else could he not have known how useless he would be thereafter? For thirty years he had lived in conversation with boys, answerable to their own sense of how things worked, to their skepticism, and, most gravely, to their trust. Even when alone he had read and thought in their imagined presence, made responsible by it, enlivened and honed by it. Now he read in solitude and thought in solitude and hardly felt himself to be alive.

Related Characters: The Narrator, Dean Makepeace
Page Number: 189-190
Explanation and Analysis:

Arch stopped and looked down the garden to where the headmaster stood by the drinks table with another master. The headmaster said, Late for his own funeral! and everyone laughed, then he put his glass down and came toward Arch with both hands outstretched. Though the headmaster was the younger man, and much shorter, and though Arch was lame and had white hairs coming out of his ears and white stubble all over his face, he felt no more than a boy again—but a very well-versed boy who couldn’t help thinking of the scene described by these old words, surely the most beautiful words ever written or said: His father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him.

Related Characters: The Headmaster (speaker), The Narrator, Dean Makepeace
Page Number: 195
Explanation and Analysis: