This Boy’s Life: Chapter 16 Summary & Analysis

One afternoon, rifling through his mother’s things while she’s out, Jack finds a letter to her from his uncle, who lives in Paris. That night, Jack writes his uncle a long letter, painting a “nightmare picture” of his and Rosemary’s lives in Chinook. He does accurately detail Dwight’s abuse—he exaggerates, getting carried away with his own story. At the end of the letter, he begs his uncle to bring him and Rosemary to live in Paris.

One afternoon, weeks later, Rosemary catches Jack at the front door as he’s coming back from his paper route and asks him to take a walk with her. As they set off, she asks him what in the world he wrote to her brother and how he got the address—Jack confesses to taking the letter from her bureau. Rosemary hands Jack a new letter from his uncle, expressing “shock and sympathy” at how bad things are Chinook and yet stating that there’s not enough room for both Jack and Rosemary to come live with them.

Jack’s uncle, however, makes an interesting proposal: he wants Jack to consider coming to Paris by himself to live with their family for a year, while Rosemary leaves Dwight and finds work stateside. Rosemary asks Jack what he thinks about the plan, and he says it sounds all right. They are both grinning at one another as they return to the house.

They tell Dwight about the idea of Jack going to Paris, and Dwight is “all for [it.]” Pearl, meanwhile, is insanely jealous. Jack begins telling his friends at school about his impending year abroad, and even manages to take time off his regular studies to work on some “special projects” about French art, history, and culture.

As the start of the summer and Jack’s date of departure nears, another letter comes from Jack’s uncle in Paris—it states that he has reconsidered his original idea. It doesn’t make sense to go to all the trouble, he says, of uprooting Jack’s life for just a year in Paris; by the time he acclimates and learns some of the language, it’ll be time to go home. Instead, they offer to adopt Jack formally and permanently and allow him to live with them for five years, until he finishes high school.

Jack is disheartened, but Rosemary urges Jack to seriously consider his uncle’s generous offer. Jack is concerned about having to change his name and give up who he is, but his mother insists the decision is his. Dwight, meanwhile, unleashes “a frenzy of coaxing and bullying and opinion-dispensing,” delighted, seemingly, at the thought of getting rid of Jack forever. Dwight tells Jack he’d better think fast and make up his mind.

Jack knows, however, that there is nothing to think about—he is his mother’s son, and cannot be anyone else’s. He feels this on an instinctual level, and also intuits that his mother, deep down, does not want him to go. Later in life, he will learn that this was true—though she will admit that she dreamed of fleeing their situation constantly.

A few days after the letter, Jack announces at dinner one night that he’s not going to Paris. Dwight insists that Jack must go. When Jack says he doesn’t want to change his name, Dwight points out that Jack has already changed his first name and “might as well” change his last name, too. Rosemary interjects, begging Dwight to stop badgering Jack.