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.
Part 1, Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “King’s Court”
Gantos’ temporary home, the King’s Court motel, is run by an eccentric self-proclaimed descendent of Davy Crockett. Gantos attends high school and secures steady work at the Piggly Wiggly (a grocery store). The first third of the chapter details that how Gantos goes about practicing writing is through imitation. He writes passages from other writers that strike him as significant and keeps a list of vocabulary words, mostly minimizing the act of original writing on his part.
Another part of the chapter provides foreshadowing: Gantos describes his attraction to the fact that his high school functioned as a former prison. He also preoccupies himself with lewd words and images of a naked woman and states that “[i]t was sexy to imagine myself in prison” (24). He finds crime television equally interesting and is drawn to the dangerous women and crude behavior of detectives and perpetrators. One event of particular importance is a school assembly where four inmates from the local prison speak to the students about how they ended up in prison. Unaffected, Gantos accepts an invitation to smoke marijuana shortly afterward, barely completes high school, and declines the opportunity to attend college.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “On the Road”
After deciding not to attend college, Gantos decides to change himself: he commits to a trip of self-exploration and joins his family, newly relocated to St. Croix, the largest of the islands comprising the U.S. Virgin Islands. In the lead-up to his time in St. Croix, he sells all his possessions aside from his car and seeks fodder for his writing in the form of adventure. One significant choice is to join his friend Tim Scanlon in a failed adventure to purchase and sell weed. Gantos loses most of his money in the scheme and decides to depart King’s Court. He drives through Florida and visits the homes of famous writers: Stephen Crane, Tennessee Williams, and Ernest Hemingway. He arrives in Key West amidst a hurricane threat, one that turns out to be a strong tropical storm. The visit provides an experience to write about, but he states, “[o]f course, I didn’t write a word” (53). Instead, he spends his time drinking and lounging on a deck chair at Ernest Hemingway’s home before boarding a boat to St. Croix.
Part 1, Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Although King’s Court is decrepit, with a sign full of blown out bulbs that resemble “rotted teeth” (16), it is attractive to Gantos because Davy, the eccentric owner, and its other long-standing tenants, are in such stark contrast to the strict, boring Bacons he lived with prior. However, though Gantos sees himself as a person with a bright future, he remains stagnant. Even his notebooks are derivative. He copies passages about being greatbut fails to write his own material. Much of the journals’ contents are full of great writing by other people. As for the few ideas that are original, he recalls, “I’d flip through these pages, reading to myself, pondering each idea and rejecting them. All of them” (22). This demonstrates Gantos’ lack of determination and follow-through, skills he finds out are the key to a writer’s success. He even travels to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West home, an author well noted for his workmanship and constant revision, and fails to write anything. Gantos is after adventure; he wishes to be near great writers, visiting their homes and reading their books, but he has no desire to adopt their ethos of hard work: he waits, instead, for chances to come to him.
The setting of Chapter Three is also significant; it introduces the idea of prison and the criminal mind while Gantos is at school. The reader finds out that Gantos’high school was once literally a prison. Instead of being off put by this, the walls covered in lewd language and drawings, etched into the concrete by desperate men, enliven Gantos. One particular picture is of a nude, reclining woman, which Gantos sits beside and traces with this finger; this act triggers sexual fantasies of being in prison and being roughed up by hypersexual female criminals. Gantos is attracted to illicit behavior; he even dreams of seducing his psychology teacher, Miss Hall. In addition, local prisoners come to his high school; the assembly involves four inmates with life sentences presenting their stories. Instead of serving as a cautionary tale, Gantos finds their stories unbelievable and shrugs them off as ludicrous. He fails to see the small acts in their past that lead to their major crimes. Instead, he likens one to the antagonist in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” He recalls the famous line the Misfit speaks, where the main character would have been good if she faced the threat of death each day. This message is lost on Gantos; he says of the prisoners, “there was nothing we had in common” (30) and continues to squander his own opportunities. In addition, he quotes O’Connor’s character, but fails to recognize himself in the role of the inmate. Gantos can identify better with characters in a novel as opposed to real men; after reading about a character like the Misfit, he states, “and when I regain my own voice it was always strangely scarred from the experience, as though something in me had been torn open and then healed over. But that didn’t mean I’d end up in prison” (31). The reader is aware, however, that it is this disconnect between his fantasy world and his reality that will be what lands Gantos in prison.
The imitation of great writers is another major theme of the memoir and Gantos’ slippery ease into using drugs fuels a connection with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Seduced by the characters, the freedom, and joie-de-vivre contained in the novel, he embarks on his own road trip. First, he eschews institutions like higher education, opting to forego college. Instead, he joins a friend, Tim Scanlon, on a scheme to sell drugs. Much like the oft-turning fortunes of the characters in On the Road, Gantos loses his money in the venture, but rebounds by touring famous writers’ homes. His need to drive directly into the storm in Key West also demonstrates a keen desire for lived experience, despite the consequences. He uses Kerouac’s characters, among other fictional characters, to create a personality for himself. Gantos becomes less like an actual person, and more a conglomerate of the exceptional characters he reads about. However, Gantos, unlike Kerouac, does not record his early adventures; he passively allows the events to push him, unaware of the metaphorical storm inside himself. Things happen to Gantos, and he fails to recognize what real dangers throwing oneself into such a storm can bring about.
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