Life After High School Eassay

5 Pages 1241 Words

High school, a stepping stone, a coming of age, a time of change, a time of growing and planning, a time of living and enjoying, a beginning for some and an end or transition for others. Joyce Carol Oates Life after High School takes us to a time in the late 1950s to South Lebanon High School and shows us the lives of three people at a time of self-discovery. Zachary Graff, Barbara "Sunny" Burhman and Tobias Shank were three friends and classmates who held secrets and truths between them which no one else in the school or town would discover.
Zachary Graff (a round character) was, until about the ninth grade, just an unrecognizable nerdy looking person. He was six and a half feet tall, 203 pounds with an IQ of 160. Upon graduation, his parents had wanted him to attend Muhlenberg College, a church-affiliated school, but Zachary, who would have been the valedictorian, wanted to go wherever Sunny would go. His frame was large and he would move clumsily down the halls of the high school with a gaze on the horizon as if not noticing anyone. Zachary had an eye problem, myopia or nearsightedness, which caused him to have to wear corrective glasses. His glasses were "chunky black plastic frames", which he constantly kept pushing up on his nose for fear they were falling. He was not unpopular in school as much as he was "feared, thus disliked (573)." The boys in Zachary's school envied him for his "plum-colored 1956 Plymouth" that his family could afford to buy. They felt "it seemed to them distinctly unfair that Zachary, of all people, had his own car, when so few of them, who loved cars, did." This car was Zachary's last choice as his final place to be in South Lebanon. Zachary's father was the "town's preeminent physician", so his family had a high standing in this little town with a population of 3,800. Everyone knew everyone else. Zachary, a baptized Lutheran, and his parents were members of the First Lutheran Church where they never fai...