"Hunters in the Snow"

"Hunters in the Snow"
Tobias Wolff

In this short story, the reader feels sympathy for Tub early on. He waits for his friends for an hour out in the snow. Also, his friends mock him for being overweight and leave him behind while they are hunting. This early feeling of sympathy for Tub causes the reader to feel disgust and disapproval of Frank and Kenny. However, the reader may begin to feel some sympathy for Frank towards the middle to the end of the story. Early in the story, Kenny teases Frank  about " a certain babysitter", which upsets Frank suggesting that the babysitter has deeper involvement with Frank. After Tub shot Kenny, Frank and Tub have a heart-to-heart conversation in the cab of the truck. Frank reveals that his foul temper stems from his contemplation of leaving his wife to pursue a fifteen year old girl. Also in this set of conversations, Tub reveals that his obesity is not from a gland disorder but from his inability to control his desire to eat. This conversation which allows the reader to feel some sympathy for both characters because of their problems also causes the reader to not feel sympathy for these characters because their problems are trivial and could be easily managed.The true sympathy in this story is not for Tub who cannot control his eating habits, or for Frank who lusts for a fifteen year old girl, but for Kenny who was shot and mistakenly thinks that is idiotic friends are actually taking him to the hospital. " ' I'm going to the hospital, ' Kenny said. But he was wrong. They had taken a different turn a long way back" (Wolff). The reader feels sympathy for Kenny because, even though he was mean earlier in the story, he now lies shot, bleeding, freezing, and possibly dying in the bed of a truck while his two friends mope over their comparatively minor issues.