This Boy's Life Transformation Quotes

Jack's trying to change into his mother and her habit of periodically pulling up stakes and changing everything about their lives. When you move every six months, it gets easy to tell stories about who and what you are.

And just so we're clear, Jack wants us to know that he's interested in changing himself; it's not just Mom pushing her agenda on him.

Grown-ups in the book are definitely interested in transforming Jack. Dwight wants him to be a "man," Mom wants him to be a good boy, Sister James wants him to be a good Catholic (or at least a non-Mormon), etc. It could be that Jack's need to transform is a necessary way of determining who he is by himself, rather than letting others transform him.

Key point here: Jack ties his transformation into gunplay. Carrying a gun, to be specific. It's probably part of his need for control over his life—a gun makes you feel in control, even if you aren't—but it plays a big role in his development. And he does ultimately join the army, after all.

Here's where storytelling and imagination enter into Jack's journey. He's living in a cheap little boardinghouse room, but he thinks of it as something cool and romantic: something out of a detective story. Sounds a lot better than "a crappy attic in a boardinghouse," doesn't it?

This is one of Jack's big misunderstandings about life. Call it 'Fake It Til You Make It Syndrome': all he has to do is pretend hard enough and he'll change. Sadly, it just ain't that easy.

Here's a symbol of transformation that might possibly match what Jack's going through. It looks like a beaver, it's shaped like a beaver, but it's actually just a pile of stinky creepy mold. Could it mark the difference between real change and just the pretend change that Jack keeps trying?

Even late in the game, Jack's still trying to transform just by imitating someone else. It makes him aware of the desire to transform, but is he aware of the way he's really transforming?

It's very brief, but Jack may have found his real tool of transformation here: writing, which is what he's so good at and which he's discovering here for the first time. (He went on to write a bestseller, after all, so we'll take it as a given.)

This is a very odd statement in a book that's about trying to change. Not only does Jack want to change, but he's going to change whether he wants to or not. And yet here, he says that all of us think we're going to stay the same. Hmmmm.