The Right Stuff By Tom Wolfe

The novel “The Right Stuff” by Tom Wolfe’s is one of the most excellent existing examples of what is typically known as the “factual story,” a type that Wolfe assisted to form. In narrating the non-fictional narrative of the beginning of the narration of the United States’ manned spaceflight program, the author has used a lot of methods used in fiction novels. Although these kind of realistic deliberations like time, place, mechanical and technical data, and memoirs are conscientiously precise, the story bound methods of viewpoint, flow of awareness, and characterization are given free rein. Wolfe has combined the good historian’s exhaustive research and attention to detail with the novelist’s imaginative license, and the result is not only as reliable an account as one is likely to encounter of America’s love affair with spaceflight but also a highly enjoyable comic novel.

Definition: Argument

For the most part, The Right Stuff is organized in chronological order, an important exception being a flashback chapter devoted to the legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager, who throughout the book epitomizes “the right stuff.” While the entire book serves as an extended definition of the title, Wolfe succinctly defines it in the second chapter; speaking of military test pilots, from whose ranks were drawn the seven original Mercury astronauts, Wolfe writes:

As to just what this ineffable quality was . . . well, it obviously involved bravery. But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life. . . . No, the idea here (in the all-enclosing fraternity) seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment—and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite—and ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God. . . . A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids . . . and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff.  (Wolfe, 89)

This definition sets the tone and the style for Wolfe’s treatment of the military test pilots with whose exploits the book is concerned. The Right Stuff is a celebration of a uniquely American sort of heroism during an age that desperately needed heroes. Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, The Right Stuff chronicles the United States’ “battle for the stars,” beginning with the experimental flights of the Army Air Forces (later the United States Air Force) at bleak Muroc Field in California in the years immediately following World War II.

The most significant event of this early period, Chuck Yeager’s breaking of the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, serves also as one of the central episodes of the book and as the symbolic beginning of the American space race. Though relatively little of The Right Stuff is directly devoted to Yeager, he remains an offstage figure of mythic proportions, his heroic feats in the Air Force’s X series of aircraft opening and closing the book and providing both a parallel and a contrast to the better-publicized Mercury and Apollo space programs.

Wolfe first discovers the “right stuff” among the close-knit group of military fighter and test pilots stationed at bleak air bases scattered throughout the United States in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. In general the “stuff” could be defined as the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment—and then go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day and do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a people, to a nation, to humanity, to God. (Wolfe, 101)

This ability and willingness to push the outside of the envelope was the sole quality upon which the “True Brotherhood” of fliers judged themselves and each other. The “right stuff” determined, more surely than military rank, the fliers’ status in the rigid hierarchy of flying.

Conclusion

The bulk of “The Right Stuff” describes vividly and imaginatively the selection, training, and missions of the original seven Mercury astronauts. Wolfe describes with humor and insight the originally negative response of military test pilots to the burgeoning space program, the sometimes comical indoctrination and training programs undergone by the astronaut candidates, the internecine strife that accompanied the formation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and, significantly, the role played by the press in transforming the seven Mercury astronauts from relatively obscure military fliers into public heroes. The book closes with the beginning of the Apollo program, which would land an American astronaut on the moon in 1969. By that time “the right stuff” and those who possessed it had had an incalculable effect on America’s sense of national identity and its role in the world.