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79 pages 2 hours read

Jack Gantos

Hole In My Life

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2002

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Symbols & Motifs

Gantos’ Face/Picking at Skin

Gantos often alerts the reader to the status of his face throughout the narrative. The first is at the beginning at the memoir, where he helps the reader interpret his prison picture: his greasy hair, long sideburns, and especially his pockmarked, acned face—the result of having picked at his face throughout young adulthood. At times of great stress, Gantos would pick at his face, worsening the acne already there and making it difficult to shave.

Awaiting trial, Gantos is in a hotel room, at the Chelsea Hotel. When he looks in the mirror, he sees “a disfiguring disease that was slowly reshaping his face” (132); as his options for escape fade, Gantos picks more feverishly at his face. Losing control over most aspects of his life prompts him to exert control over the few things he can.

While in prison, Gantos is again struck most by the lack of control he has over his own life; the lurking violence that threatens him and his fellow inmates is sometimes capricious, sparing one man only to victimize another. He finds a position that provides relative safety from having his number called, but he still struggles with the notion that his freedom and his fate are out of his control. Thus, he continues to pick at his face.

The obsession with his skin, and disfiguring it, comes again after he realizes he won’t be paroled for another two years: delaying his freedom and fact that the panel finds him remorseless and sociopathic causes another setback in his ability to control his fate, and he again turns to picking his face as a mode of self-empowerment.

The Color Yellow

Yellow is used to depict setting and mood at significant points in the memoir, and the color is associated with staleness, ugliness, and ill health. Yellow permeates Gantos’ physical environment and affects his perception of himself as another ugly, rotting thing. When Gantos sees yellow, readers can mark the emotional impact of his poor decisions. Gantos conjures the color in moments where his thoughts or setting turn increasingly negative.

The color first installs itself via its overwhelming presence in Gantos’ King’s Court motel room. The motel’s sign, Gantos notes, seems to be framed by yellowed teeth. Inside, it begins with a yellowed shower curtain, then he notices it on the walls, the floor and as an odor in the air—that of a rotted lemon. He remarks then that yellow is not a good color for him, but does not connect it yet with the decay starting within himself. 

When he returns to The King’s Court while on the lam, Gantos recognizes the same yellow quality of the room immediately. At this point, the color yellow attaches to Gantos’ reflection, as if yellow is now the jaundiced nature of him, as well, as he finds himself in another exhausting and hopeless situation. The color yellow even emanates from his being, most prominently seen when the puss he squeezes from his acned face is yellow and his flesh is described as “rotting fruit” (132), the mottled appearance of a spoiled brown and yellow banana coming to mind.

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