Hole In My Life

The final two chapters detail the end of Gantos’ incarceration, focusing primarily on what life will be like as a free man.As the previous chapters explain how Gantos ends up in jail, they focus on the past: Gantos tries to trace his mistakes back to a point of origin, and attempts to find the moment where he makes his first error in judgement and how that one error seems to multiply, landing him in jail. Breaking the pervasive tone of fear and despair, Chapters Seven and Eight are marked with a positive outlook, as Gantos finds a way to secure his release and finally formally study writing. 

Two characters that play a central role in this optimism are Gantos himself and his new caseworker, Mr. Casey. Casey, in stark contrast to Gantos’ first caseworker, Wilcox, champions Gantos’ case, helping him achieve his goal. His character also works in opposition to many of the father or mentor figures in Gantos’ life—his father, Hamilton, Rik—that tend to use Gantos for money or berate him, rather than encourage him. A good example of this is when Gantos receives news of acceptance from the college and when the parole board grants his release: a proud Casey runs to the hospital ward with the positive news. Until then, Gantos finds the system condemning and cruel; he sees no avenue where he can exert control over his own life. Casey’s efforts contrast that mentality, and Gantos himself begins to reshape his character: these chapters show a significant difference in Gantos: he turns a previously inert, unaccountable attitude into one of action; where his previous attitude is shaped by present circumstance, Gantos now plans for a future, out of prison and as a writer. 

As Gantos finally brings the reader into the narrative’s present time, many of the memoir’s symbols, motifs and themes also resolve. First, Gantos acquires real freedom, which contrasts to the freedom he believes himself to have prior to incarceration. The ideas that he must be free to seek adventure, and thatgreat writing is a product of adventure, fade into the background: towards the end of his prison sentence and in college, Gantos remarks, “once again, I began retrieving the lost treasures of my childhood” (199). Here, he realizes that he had the stories he needed all along; now, he has the discipline to craft those ideas into complete, competent stories. In a twist, having responsibilities fuels his writing and his dedication to his recovery. In addition, his nervous habit of picking at his face recedes; feeling free and taking control of his life subverts his need to control how he looks and he begins to heal physically, too, his face returning to normal in the absence of content abuse from Gantos himself.

As for the nearly-constant violence Gantos depicts throughout his memoir, he states, “one day I got tired of all the blood and guts and hard hearts” (198) and he resolves to make the violent images in each previous chapter a part of his past, and to remember these moments as infrequently as possible. This is also represented in his decision not to contact Hamilton, Lucas, or other people from his past life. By the end of the memoir, Gantos leaves the confines of his “yellow cell” (154) and “rotted hash” (200) in the past and the final parts of the book involve only thoughts of a brighter future.