What is The Right Stuff? :: The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff - What is the Stuff? As might be expected from the title, The Right Stuff is centered on the concept of having the right stuff. Author Tom Wolfe uses several recurring techniques and comparisons to describe this idea and its relationship to the men who took part in the Mercury program. An opening chapter of the book is devoted to the "right stuff" in order to explain the concept to the reader. In this chapter, Wolfe makes a clear distinction between the right stuff and simple bravery. He tells the reader that a possessor of the right stuff can not only risk his life. He "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" (19). One critic interprets the distinction as being "between the actual experience of the right stuff- of being a fighter pilot and experiencing, for example, night landings on an aircraft carrier- and any prior effort to describe that experience in language" (Marowski and Matuz 419). In the same chapter, the reader is also introduced to an element which recurs throughout the rest of the book. The author compares a career in flying to the climbing of a ziggurat, an extraordinarily high and steep pyramid. In an especially vivid passage he writes: "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 and could move higher and higher and even-ultimately...be able to join the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff" (19 ). Through this pyramid the world is divided into those who had the stuff and those were just left behind. Another characteristic of the right stuff is the pilots' relationship with one another. These pilots seem to always want to associate only with one another. Wolfe shows the reader the pilots' belief that only other pilots can understand their daily life and death struggles. In their discussions, though, it is shown that the pilots never like to use words like "danger," "bravery," and "fear." Instead they use a special code or explain by example.