1C McMahon Commentary on "Mortals" by Tobias Wolff

The narrator of "Mortals" is a man seething with inner demons and contradictions that are evident throughout the story. That he is an apathetic functionary for a newspaper languishing in his failed dreams points to his sense of failure and futility. Rather than improve his lot, however, he succumbs to laxity and nihilism as he coasts along his job with negligence and mediocrity. Rather than judge himself for his own shortcomings, he obsesses self-righteously over the flaws of others while coddling his self-pity. Obsessed with death, he feels morally superior to the ignorant, bovine masses who plod along oblivious of their own mortality. However, the narrator errors: His real motivation for obsessing over death is not his superior philosophical position but rather his deeply rooted and understandable fear that he has squandered his life on self-pity alternated with grandiose self-exaltation. Another contradiction is evident in his gnawing hatred for Givens, the peasant-like impostor who presumably called in an obituary for his own fictitious death. While Givens is a sniveling coward, the real reason he generates so much hatred in the narrator is that Givens is a mirror reflection of the narrator's woeful deficiencies. Both of them are self-pitying, lazy cowards squandering their lives away on mediocrity and inflated self-esteem. So inflated is Givens' self-appraisal (a man of "loyalty" indeed!)that his phony obituary renders him "resurrected," to use the narrator's language.   In fact, no "resurrection" is evident. The lofty obituary is in fact a canard or a chimera, an exaggerated narrative designed to give meaning and shape to a life that has neither. That the narrator sees his own fraudulent self inside Givens attests to his penetrating hatred of him. Their antipathy is mutual--two lost souls hating the other while blind to their own premature death.