Holes Essay

            Inner strength through adversity-Zero .
             Hector Zeroni , or Zero , in Lois Sachar's book Holes.
             has been homeless for most of his life, and his mother abandoned (or lost) him when he was still small. Zero has not had much of an education so he does not know how to read or write. Despite all the adversity that he has faced, Zero knows that he is smart and he has a sense of standing up for himself , this helps Zero to gain tremendous inner strength. At first Zero is presented as a strange character. He rarely spoke and always walked around with a scowl on his face. Right away Zero is labeled as an idiot. Before everyone got know Zero they thought he wasn't very smart. Not being able to read nor write doesn't help Zero's social problems either. This is a great example of how much adversity Zero is having to stare down. Zero has a tough time at camp until Stanley arrives . Eventually, when Zero becomes friends with Stanley, the reader learns that Zero is silent because he does not like answering questions. Most likely because he is wary of people like Mr. Pendanski, who always mock him. Zero overcomes this adversity and builds enough inner strength to ignore all of the things the Mr. Pendanski does to him. It is harder than it seems, most of the time people want to fight back, but Zero doesn't.
             Before the story begins to unfold , there was everything that happened with Zero's mother. Imagine , Zero as a little boy and is dropped off at the park alone . Although this was done regularly by Zero's mother , Zero never liked it when she did this. He commented on the subject in (Sachar page 194) when he said " I never liked it when she left?" for she could not always take him everywhere she went. This does not appear to be any sort of adversity to Zero , until Zero's mother never came back to pick him up. Now Zero is forced to swallow the fact that he has to live alone , without a mother. This is a great example of the adversity that Zero must face in the book.