Holes — Chapter 37

About This Passage

Sachar uses the arrival of dusk and insects to do two kinds of work at once. The sentences narrate a natural event — the sky darkening, bugs rising, sweat drawing a swarm — but they are also doing the novel's characteristic compression: the boys' own bodies have become the bait that attracts life. The phrasing 'attracted by their sweat' turns the body into an object in an ecological grammar, a sentence fragment in a wider economy of predators and prey. Note the flat clause 'Neither Stanley nor Zero had the strength to try to swat at them' — the author refuses adverbs, refuses dramatization, and yet delivers the weight of the boys' weakness in a single plain declarative. This is a good test passage for studying Sachar's stylistic economy.

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 37 as a developed narrative. What is the psychology at the base of the mountain — why does Stanley fear the nearness of his own long-sought goal? What is the geometry of the climb, and how does Sachar describe it? Track the reading lessons through this chapter — what is spelled, what fails, what finally arrives after a ten-minute delay? What inference does Stanley draw from the weed patches and gnats? How does the chapter close, and what is the specific force of its final sentence?

Discussion Questions

1. Stanley's claim that losing Big Thumb's water would mean losing 'nothing, not even hope' treats hope as something extinguishable. Examine the phenomenology of hope embedded in this chapter. Is hope better described as a possession, a practice, a relation to the future, or an ontological structure? Use textual evidence to defend your view.
2. Sachar stages Zero's vomiting mid-spelling and then narrates the gnats' relocation with the deadpan of a natural historian. Close-read the stylistic gamble. What is the author risking by refusing to dramatize grotesque suffering, and what is he gaining?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide