Kenny is the most aggressive of the three, probing the weaknesses in Tub, who is overweight and is self-conscious about and denies his condition, and Frank, who feels defensive and guilty about and denies the immorality of his affair with a teenage babysitter. Frank and Kenny share a close relationship from which they exclude Tub they insult him and push him to his limit.

The truck is driven by Kenny, who looks at Tub and remarks, “He looks just like a beach ball with a hat on, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he, Frank?” This opening with its suggestion of aggression, insults, violence, and near-misses sets the mood for the rest of the story. The story opens in the driving snow as Tub, who has been waiting over an hour for his friends Frank and Kenny, is forced to leap out of the path of the truck that jumps the sidewalk and nearly kills him. The relentlessly falling snow and the numbing cold suffuse this story of fl awed friendships gone irreversibly awry.

Removed from the apparently safe haven of their homes and jobs in Spokane, Washington, each of the men seeks some sort of self-validation through the masculine ritual of the hunt, and if their discoveries seem not to alarm them, they surely distress the reader. Wolff’s story features three men on a hunting trip, but the friendships among the three men evolve in a complex, ironic, and contradictory manner so that the concepts of hunters and hunted, men and animals, seem to exchange places. One of the most penetrating and riveting of the 12 stories in Tobias Wolff’s 1981 collection In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, “Hunters in the Snow” was selected as the title story of the British edition that appeared in the following year. Analysis of Tobias Wolff’s Hunters in the Snow

Hunters in the snow wolff