Tobias Wolff’s first published short story “Smokers” (1976) explores the way social aspiration and class conflicts shape the personality of its unnamed narrator. It also presents the world of an expensive prep school for boys as an allegory for the cynical, heartless real world. The arc of the narrator’s character is tested in the context of his relationships with the story’s other principal characters: Eugene Miller, a “scholarship boy” from the Midwest like the narrator, and Talbot Nevin, a wealthy “legacy” student whose family has made substantial financial endowments to the school. At the very onset, the narrator announces his intention of allying himself with the Talbots of this world, rather than the Eugenes. Ambitious and susceptible to the social pressure of fitting in, the narrator clings to the notion that friendships with “boys whose fathers ran banks and held Cabinet office and wrote books” is his ticket to a more glamorous, meaningful world.

I wanted to be their friend and go home with them on vacation and someday marry one of their sisters, and Eugene Miller didn't have much of a place in these plans.

In sharp contrast to the narrator’s secretive, manipulative personality is Eugene’s openness. “His head too big for his lanky body,” oily-skinned and wearing a “green Alpine hat with feathers stuck in the brim” when the narrator first encounters him on the train to Connecticut, Eugene is unapologetic about himself. Though the narrator dismisses Eugene’s suggestion of rooming together at Choate in the hope of finding a more strategic partner, ironically it is Eugene who ends up drawing for a roommate Talbot, the very embodiment of upper-crust glamour for the narrator. Hence the narrator is forced to keep Eugene in his orbit, as a way of forging a friendship with the cool, suave Talbot. Significantly, he takes up smoking so as not to be left out of the cohort of Talbot and Eugene, who are both smokers.

Up to this moment the rule against smoking had not been a problem for me because I did not smoke. Now it was a problem, because I did not want Eugene to have a bond with Talbot that I did not share.

The discovery of smoking is sure to lead to expulsion at Choate, but the narrator is ready to take the chance in order to be part of Talbot’s inner circle. As the story and the school term progresses, we see the narrator try to ingratiate himself with Talbot in different ways, including inviting him for frequent tennis games. Yet, it is again Eugene and not the narrator who is invited to the Nevin home for the Christmas vacations. It seems to the narrator that Eugene doesn’t have to do much to earn his roommate’s confidence, except be himself—a friendly boy who excels at swimming. When the rest of the school too doesn’t find Eugene’s “conspicuousness” particularly odd, the narrator seethes in jealousy. The narrator’s questionable behavior and his antipathy towards the benign Eugene is generated as much by class conflicts as by his individual temperament. Wolff’s story is grounded in the reality that students like Talbot do enjoy a measure of privilege both in the closed-in society of Choate and the larger world in general, as is revealed in the way the story ends.

If the narrator’s ethics are in question, so are Talbot’s, who begins to extort a price for his friendship, which is to make the narrator write his English essays for him. Talbot’s own thoughtless writing reveals to the narrator the degree of his privilege: cushioned by entitlement, Talbot simply does not feel the need to apply himself to his work. These subtle dynamics are not overtly spelled out in the story, but are obvious in the subtext of the relationship between the narrator and Talbot.

I read the essay. The writing was awful, but what really shocked me was the absolute lack of interest with which he described the most interesting person he had ever known.

The only member of their trio whose behavior stands the test of ethics is Eugene, for which he pays a significant price in the end. For Eugene, the narrator is poignantly always the first pick for roommate, even when the second term rolls in. The narrator evades Eugene’s offer again, confident that Talbot will room with him second time around. But when Talbot dashes his hopes, the narrator decides to cut his losses and refuses to do his homework for him any longer. He also drops his mask of constant pretense when he walks out of Talbot’s room, telling him he won’t be coming around to play basketball,

"Because I don't feel like going to basketball, that's why not."

At this point, the reader is briefly lulled into thinking that the narrator has had a breakthrough moment of realization and may enter a more reflective mode. However, in the very next scene we learn that the dorm is in an uproar because the dorm superintendent “Big John” has caught Eugene smoking.

He had come into Eugene's room and found him there alone and smelled cigarette smoke. Eugene had denied it but Big John tore the room apart and found cigarettes and butts all over the place. Eugene was over at the headmaster's house at this moment.

What the narrator does not reveal to anyone is that it was Talbot and he who had been smoking right before Big John caught the smell of the cigarette smoke and traced it back to the boys’ room. Although he is tempted to report Talbot’s smoking to the Dean, the narrator does not do so for fear of indicting himself in the process. Consequently, Eugene is expelled from the school, crying openly. After Eugene’s cab leaves the school grounds, the narrator notices Big John imitate Eugene to the Dean, who breaks out in a giggle. The ugly scene seals the narrator's impression that the world is a merciless place, and grown men are as heartless and petty as teenage boys. Therefore, the only way to succeed in such a world is through being the antithesis of Eugene.

Conveniently, Talbot also distances himself from Eugene, and the narrator begins to convince himself that since Eugene did smoke at Choate earlier, his punishment is justified. Talbot and the narrator become roommates, signifying that the real world’s dubious moral order has been restored and the narrator’s initial prophecy that people like Eugene do not belong at Choate, fulfilled.

On Friday Talbot came up to me after squash practice and asked if I wanted to room with him next year.

"I'll think about it," I told him.

"The names have to be in by dinner time tonight."

"I said I'll think about it."

That evening Talbot submitted our names to the dean. There hadn't really been that much to think about. For all I knew Eugene had been smoking when Big John came in the room. If you wanted to get technical about it, he was guilty as charged a hundred times over, it wasn't as if some great injustice had been done.