Tobias Wolff’s “ The Deposition” is a story of humiliated justice and the lies behind the humiliation. The characters in the story search for their ideal and get deprived of that as false statements and confessions obstruct their ways to attain what is just. Starting with the witness in the court and then with the lawyer Burke, the characters undergo an echoing ambiguous therapy of fallacy and false justice that turns the story into a tale of escaping truth and attempting to establish their own lies which leads judgments to be incorrect.
The main character of the story, the lawyer Burke, has come to New delft “ to take this significant deposition in person” (1) and his client was a woman whose son was a “paralegal in Burkes firm”(three). Due to the surgical malpractice of the surgeon, the woman has lost the appropriate functioning of her left hand and cannot perform anymore at the reservation desk of a car rental workplace as she was a “fifty-eight-year old booking agent who could no longer use a keyboard.” (1). However the lady did not give up her hopes to get the justice for the loss she has encountered. According to the narrator, “she was a battler.”(3) and as a result she moved to San Francisco to live with her son and to fight the battle for justice. She searched for her rights and wanted to attain them and therefore she was never afraid of producing right documents and reports to the investigators, threat of counter suits and nothing at all could avoid her from seeking justice “she lowered her head and kept coming.”(3). This attitude of the old and poor lady who had “spent all her savings going after the surgeon” (three) inspired Burke to deal with her case so that she could find some peace and justice just after what had been carried out to her.
When Burke takes the old disabled woman’s case to the court, we see an ambiguous and strange situation exactly where the witness does not keep in mind what he has stated earlier. “The witness was playing tough to get. Statements he had produced earlier to his girlfriend, one more nurse, statements essential to Burke’s case, the witness now declined to repeat below oath. He claimed not to remember just what he had said, or even to recall clearly the episode in query..”(1) This was mainly because “he was no doubt below fantastic pressure to stand by…