Jimmy, the Good Guy and The Art of Transformation

What I love about the voice of the narrator is that is doesn’t ask for pity; Jimmy the character is alone, but not a victim; he has the ability to see other sides of people and can own up to his mistakes, but is not a martyr. This narrator has a big job and asks a lot of his reader. He asks us to understand and feel compassion for the prison world and to understand his need to participate in it violently, to not see this as contradictory to his other intentions. He also asks us, in the midst of blood and guts (literally), to understand how it could have been possible for this person to transform into a poet. He achieves this, from me at least, through expertly crafting his inner and outer worlds during his prison transformation, but not without creating himself as a likable, earnest person first.

He builds a character from a little boy, narrating from a little boy’s perspective. We journey with him as tragedy after tragedy unfolds. If this goes on for much longer though, he’s making a victim out of himself. When will something good happen? We then become a teenager with him and watch him fall in love and make a friend. Marcos is the humanizing factor in this memoir. He provides the outside view of Jimmy that we need. Though Jimmy yearns for his family and love, they don’t exist as solid characters. They are memories, hopes, and fleeting, disappointing lovers. From Marcos, we know that Jimmy is a true friend and that Marcos adores him. Knowing and believing that Jimmy is well-intentioned and good, is key in order for prison to follow and for the reader to sympathize.

Once in prison, the way he narrates his transformation in solitary was really effective. The way he does this reminds me a little of the way that Holloway recounts her past towards the end of Driving with Dead People—searching for clues and asking questions of events she already narrated from a child’s perspective. From the floor in solitary, Jimmy is looking for something different. In a portion of the book that had the chance of being very dark, hopeless, and hard to read, he takes us back into time and looks for any happiness he can find to keep him going, and uses that place he finds as the spark of his revelation and transformation.

That spark lead to more sparks. By effectively inviting the reader into his inner world in solitary, he lends us compassion as he becomes even more violent, even “crazy.” Still working is also the good guy Baca who, even though he’s nearly killed a man, he thinks “an ominous dread filled my heart as I prayed that I didn’t kill him (124).” I mean, I suppose it could be really trite, but to me, he does a great job of painting the picture of the little boy inside him trying to speak, understand, and recover and also the man on the outside trying to exist in total madness and isolation. It begins: “It went on like this for weeks, reliving the fable of my life, rediscovering from my isolation cell the boy I was and the life I’d lived (143).”

I am most interested in how he crafted this transformation process while in prison. It was a constant back and forth between first childhood and present, and then inner world (learning to read, leaving his body) and present exterior (violent, hopeless), until finally the two merge. When his transformation was “complete” he prevented himself from killing a man and began sharing his poetry—the internal became evident in his behavior. He could exist in prison while expressing himself and being less violent.

There were a few moments that I found questionable and out of character for Baca, the good guy. When he justifies a rape of an inmate on p.190 by Bonafide saying “I knew he had to do it.” I felt that was out of character. And in terms of his transformation, there were a few moments that were bordering on cheesy. When he’s about to kill his cell mate in the yard and Neruda and Lorca stop him (206). In theory, and in retrospect maybe, but not in the moment—it comes off as cliché. Also when his con friend kills another con before he gets to him because (can’t find the quote…sorry) he needs to go out and become a writer and speak for all of the prisoners.