Growing up, the main character Jack Gantos father has always profiled random civilians as criminals but could not recognize that his son was also a criminal. The Gantos family has moved around a lot. Jack Gantos leaps from school to school then to work in Puerto Rico where is allowed to live on his own, he has been on his own since this point at 17 years old. From an early point in the memoir, the reader could infer that Gantos did something terribly wrong, for instance the narrator Jack Gantos turns to alcoholism and has dropped out of school this is a recipe for disaster from the very start, along with his new hobby of smoking hash slowly turns him into a criminal day by day. But Gantos doesn’t really want to be a criminal he feels as he
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This is a problem because he has always tried to be someone he was not. Gantos is sent to prison but is not a criminal at heart. He does not have the mentality of one, he only is doing it for the money so he can achieve his dream. Gantos trades hash for a pair of scissors makes decisions that could extend his sentence in prison. He could be on his way to college if he was not stubborn, Gantos had an opportunity and he did not take it. “And if it didn’t matter who I was, it mattered what I done to define me”(Gantos 177). He leaves his impression and it now symbolizes him. Gantos sneaks into his files where he reads that he is a social menace and realizes that he needs to change his attitude on things, he states “Prison was certainly not funny, but each new day now recedes into my past”(Gantos 199). He is ready to grow up from his selfish immature teenager years. It only takes him till his experience with prison that he realizes he could have avoided the problem as a whole.
All in all, the visit to prison had set Gantos life on a turn around. He now stops and thinks things through. For example Gantos has hash hidden next to a water fountain and in the but stops and thinks to himself and decides not to take the hash. Gantos shows a real sense of maturity since his encounter with
This is a problem because he has always tried to be someone he was not. Gantos is sent to prison but is not a criminal at heart. He does not have the mentality of one, he only is doing it for the money so he can achieve his dream. Gantos trades hash for a pair of scissors makes decisions that could extend his sentence in prison. He could be on his way to college if he was not stubborn, Gantos had an opportunity and he did not take it. “And if it didn’t matter who I was, it mattered what I done to define me”(Gantos 177). He leaves his impression and it now symbolizes him. Gantos sneaks into his files where he reads that he is a social menace and realizes that he needs to change his attitude on things, he states “Prison was certainly not funny, but each new day now recedes into my past”(Gantos 199). He is ready to grow up from his selfish immature teenager years. It only takes him till his experience with prison that he realizes he could have avoided the problem as a whole.
All in all, the visit to prison had set Gantos life on a turn around. He now stops and thinks things through. For example Gantos has hash hidden next to a water fountain and in the but stops and thinks to himself and decides not to take the hash. Gantos shows a real sense of maturity since his encounter with