Holes — Chapter 25

About This Passage

This paragraph is the hinge on which the whole of Sachar's Green Lake flashback turns. The reader is asked to notice that the town takes credit for a schoolhouse it did not build — the beautiful jewel of a building is Sam's work, yet Sam is not permitted to sit inside it and learn. The boast 'It shows how much we value education here in Green Lake' is said by people who will not let the builder of that schoolhouse attend classes. Copying this passage teaches readers to hear irony at the sentence level: the townspeople mean what they are saying, but they do not see what the reader sees, and every word of their pride becomes, a few pages later, part of the indictment against them.

Narration Prompt

Retell Chapter 25 in your own words, beginning with Sam and Mary Lou walking the dirt roads of Green Lake, and ending with Hattie Parker pointing her quivering finger and whispering, 'God will punish you!' Pay special attention to the four things Miss Katherine asks Sam to fix and to what the fixings allow to grow between them.

Discussion Questions

1. Sam says the same four words every time Miss Katherine tells him something is broken: 'I can fix that.' The first four times he says them he means a roof, a window, a desk, and a door. The fifth time he says them he means Miss Katherine's breaking heart. What does Sachar want us to understand about Sam by repeating his favorite sentence four ordinary times before using it for something extraordinary?
2. Miss Katherine first asks Sam to fix the roof, then the windows, then the desk, then the door, and finally she has 'run out of things needing to be fixed.' What do the four repairs — and especially the fact that she runs out of them — tell us about what Miss Katherine really wants, and why does she not simply say so?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide