79 pages • 2 hours read
Jack GantosHole In My Life
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Desire for Lived Experience in Order to Write
Perhaps the greatest ongoing thread in the story is that of Gantos' obsession with becoming a great writer. Many of his youthful mistakes are driven by a need to find adventure, so that adventure can be turned into a novel. Gantos often remarks that he knew he had it in him to be a famous writer, but he lacked experience and guidance to turn his ideas into structured prose. He admits, “I decided that my biggest writing problem was that I didn’t have anything worthwhile to write about. Nothing interesting happened to me” (23).
Gantos’ youth is measured by the many excuses he comes up with to avoid hard work. One constant lament he makes, and one that drives his reckless decision making, is that he cannot be a writer until he has something to write about. In turn, he stalks dead writers instead of developing his own writing craft, tracing the footsteps of various authors (Crane, Hemingway, Bishop, Poe). Instead of keeping a journal of his own stories, he records mostly inspirational bits that he reads. Throughout the narrative, Gantos relies on famous writers to fuel his adventures and provide him purpose.
Gantos stresses his fervent desire to write; this is mentioned, in some form, in every chapter of the memoir. As a young man, he patterns himself after writers he admires. One key instance of emulating great writers is when Gantos goes to the Florida Keys before joining his family in St. Croix. Despite hurricane warnings, and inspired by Crane’s main character in The Red Badge of Courage, he seeks out the home of Ernest Hemingway; sitting at Hemmingway’s house, he reflects, “It was much easier to smoke joints and have someone deliver drinks than it was for me to deliver sentences” (53). Accordingly, he mostly fails to record his own life, wasting his time with drugs or get-rich-quick schemes.
Gantos brings every novel he can find about sea adventure on his smuggling trip; these books infuse him with the notion that there is something attractive, even romantic, about what he’s doing, and he believes that he can write of his own great sea voyage. Upon finding the ship’s log, he recalls, “I loved it, and Immediately though it was up to me to record my boat’s history, like so many other sea writers had done. I turned the page, smoothed it out with my hand, and got started” (81). The prospect of filling the log excites him, as he is reading many great accounts of sea travel, imagining he is making his own similar mark. In drug-fueled excitement, he attempts to record his adventures, though the actual entries mostly lack anything other than the justifications of a criminal and the lamentations of a drug addict, rather than a finely-spun adventure on the high seas.
Thinking of himself as a writer and walking in the footsteps of great authors infiltrates every chapter; in one case, upon sailing away from St. Croix, he thinks, “But I was filled with joy and triumph, and the fires to me were the flames of Troy still burning as Odysseus pushed off for Ithaca. I was ready for adventure” (76). Gantos evokes Homer’s The Odyssey as he watches two factories burn in St. Croix while setting off on his smuggling venture. Despite the desperate conditions in which he is leaving his family, he chooses to abandon them for the lure of drugs, money, and excitement. He associates adventure with good writing here and at many junctures in his narrative. He further loses himself at points in the memoir in stories, taking on the traits of fictional characters like Odysseus, or Sal Paradise, from On the Road.
Ironically, it is his time in prison that marks most his own progress as a writer. Despite his own wild fear while incarcerated, prison forces Gantos to step out of the shadows of other writers and develop the confidence he needs to become a writer in his own right: “[i]ronically, in spite of all the fear, and remorse, and self-loathing, being locked up in prison is where I fully realized I had to change my life for the better, and in one significant way I did. It is where I went from thinking of becoming a writer, to writing” (7).
Prison Violence
Violence, mainly unprovoked, is another major theme of the memoir. There exists a violence in both Gantos not getting what he wants (to be a writer) and getting what he wants (the life of an adventurer). Gantos remarks, “[f]ear of being a target of irrational violence haunted me day and night. The constant tempo of that violence pulsed throughout my body and made me feel small, and weak, and cowardly” (4).
As teenager, Gantos is seduced by violence: from television crime shows to the drug culture abounding in St. Croix. He recalls a wall in his high school fondly: “One wall was entirely worked into a life-size portrait of a naked woman reclining. I’d sit in a deal next to her and slowly tract the curves with my fingertips. It was sexy to imagine myself in prison” (24). In this telling statement, Gantos reflects on his high school, and how it used to be a prison, bearing the marks of the former inmates and their bleak setting. Gantos chooses to sexualize the setting, leading him to connect violence and drugs with something dangerously alluring, rather than simply dangerous.
However, once faced with the threat of real violence in prison, Gantos sobers to its reality: violence is a chaotic yet certain thing in his life. He states, “[i]t was this lottery of violence that haunted me. Your number could come up anywhere, anytime—in the dark of night while you slept in a dormitory with a hundred other men, or in full daylight on the exercise field while you strolled in the sun” (4-5). One major event that foreshadows the violence to follow is when Gantos goes to visit Lucas’s wife, and she asks him if he ever considers the consequences of those he sells drugs to. Awaiting transfer, Lucas is brutally gang-raped; Gantos wishes to distance himself from him, however, fearing the violence that may happen to himself if he is seen with Lucas. Lucas’s attack is the first real violence that occurs around Gantos while incarcerated and it instills in him a fear that marks each day spent in prison.
During his time as an x-ray technician, Gantos witnesses a particularly violent assault when he and the physician’s assistant find an inmate in solitary with a broken light bulb lodged in his anus. Seeing this injury makes Gantos want to flee, though he instead returns to his cell and writes about it. Nonetheless, the image remains with him; he thinks about it when he first begins his writing program, and he finds at first that all his stories are riddled with the violence he witnessed in prison. Slowly, this recedes, but he never forgets that man in solitary and he never misunderstands the current of violence flowing through the prison system.
The theme of violence and the images of the horrible acts committed against each other in prison recede for Gantos as he takes a job selling Christmas trees and acclimates to his new life as a student. Those memories never fade entirely, the most brutal and senseless coming to him occasionally, but he decides to make the memories of that brutality as small as possible once free of prison’s violent environment.
Related Titles
By Jack Gantos
