Holes — Chapter 37

About This Passage

Sachar stages the vomiting scene with clinical precision and then, almost casually, tells us where the gnats go. The move is characteristic — he refuses melodrama but makes sure the reader understands that even Zero's illness is being preyed upon. The sentence about the gnats 'preferring the contents of Zero's stomach' is one of the novel's quietly terrible lines, and it arrives with the plain affect of a nature documentary. This is Sachar's mature mode: horror delivered in a flat register.

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 37 as a coherent narrative. What realization scares Stanley at the base of the mountain? How do the boys make their way up the slope — what is the geometry and the vegetation of the climb? How do the reading lessons survive into this chapter, and what goes wrong with 'lunch'? What scientific inference does Stanley draw from the weeds and the gnats? What happens on the last page of the chapter, and how does the author choose to end it?

Discussion Questions

1. Stanley fears that if Big Thumb has no water, they will have 'nothing, not even hope.' Explain the claim embedded in the phrase 'not even hope.' Is hope a possession that can be spent, or a relationship to the future, or something else?
2. The reading lessons continue into the hardest climb of the novel. Stanley spells 'bugs' and 'lunch.' Zero concentrates, succeeds, collapses, succeeds again minutes later. What does Sachar believe literacy is, that it can survive and even thrive in this kind of extremity?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide