Holes - Louis Sachar: Characters

Stanley is the fourteen-year-old protagonist of the novel, who has been wrongfully imprisoned at a labor camp in Texas for stealing a famous athlete’s sneakers. Before his wrongful conviction, Stanley was an overweight and extremely unhappy boy who suffered severe bullying, although he tends to be kind to others despite the cruelty he has experienced. His family has been unlucky for generations, which he believes to be the fault of the Yelnats family curse (though he also insists he doesn't actually believe in the curse). At Camp Green Lake, Stanley is forced to dig a huge hole every day and report anything interesting he finds to the Warden. He does his best to keep to himself and is soon given the nickname Caveman due to his size. As everyone seems selfish, cruel, and power-hungry, Stanley tries to stay on the good side of those in power including X-Ray, his unit’s de-facto leader, to whom Stanley promises to give anything interesting he finds. This results in Stanley handing X-Ray a gold lipstick tube belonging to the bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow. Though Stanley remains interested in and concerned for the welfare of the boys at Camp Green Lake, his heart begins to harden after being CHARACTERS Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com ©2019 LitCharts LLC v.006 www.LitCharts.com Page 3 exposed to so much cruelty. For instance, Stanley at first goes along with Mr. Pendanski and the other boys in thinking that Zero is stupid and has nothing to offer; it's not until Zero shows Stanley unprecedented kindness that Stanley begins to take Zero seriously and treat him kindly in return. This culminates in Stanley trying to steal the water truck and go after Zero, who has run into the desert. When Stanley finds Zero, he carries the weak boy up the mountain, helps him drink, and sings him an old family lullaby—which appears to break the family curse. Stanley and Zero eventually return to Camp Green Lake, where they discover a suitcase full of valuable things and are rescued from the Warden and a yellow-spotted lizard's nest by Ms. Morengo, Stanley's lawyer. After this, Stanley demonstrates that he's learned the importance of kindness by refusing to leave camp without Zero. 

Elya is referred to as Stanley's “no-good-dirtyrotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather.” He's responsible for cursing the Yelnats family after he broke a promise to his friend Madame Zeroni. Elya is described as being a kind, if somewhat idealistic, teen; he's far more interested in spending time with Madame Zeroni than he is in mud wrestling, which is held up as the sport of desirable bachelors. At age fifteen in mid-1800s Latvia, Elya fell in love with a girl named Myra. To win her hand, Madame Zeroni told Elya to carry a runty piglet up a mountain every day. There, the piglet was to drink from a stream and Elya was to sing it a special song. On the day of Myra's birthday, Elya was then supposed to carry Madame Zeroni up the mountain. However, Elya neglected to carry the pig up the hill on the last day and because of this, the pig weighed exactly the same as Igor Barkov's pig. In his disappointment at losing his love's hand, Elya boarded a ship bound for America and broke his promise to Madame Zeroni. Elya was insistent that the curse was nonsense; he was sad only because he felt bad for breaking his promise, as he knew how much she wanted to drink from the stream. Though he never admits that the curse might be real, he does tell his wife, Sarah Miller, about the curse after lightning strikes his barn for a third time. 

Zero is the smallest boy in Group D. He's black and is often scowling and angry-looking, though Stanley notices that when Zero smiles, his smile seems too big for his face. Zero is the only boy at Camp Green Lake who is referred to by his nickname by other campers and Mr. Pendanski alike; Mr. Pendanski is vocal about his belief that Zero is stupid and useless. This understandably makes Zero even angrier. None of the other boys like Zero much; he's consistently relegated to the last spot in line for water and the other boys join in Mr. Pendanski's jokes about Zero's worthlessness. He and Stanley become friends when Zero admits that he doesn't know how to read and asks Stanley to teach him. Stanley eventually learns that Zero is a very quick study and is skilled at performing mental math, despite having no formal education. In exchange for reading lessons, Zero digs part of Stanley's hole every day. After an altercation over this arrangement, Zero hits Mr. Pendanski across the face with a shovel and heads off into the desert alone. A day later, Stanley discovers that Zero is a ward of the state and thus, Mr. Pendanski and the Warden decide to destroy Zero's records and erase his entire existence. When Stanley goes out after Zero and finds him, Zero has been living under Sam's boat, eating Miss Katherine's peach preserves that he calls "sploosh." This makes him very ill. After carrying Zero to the top of God's Thumb, Stanley helps Zero drink and sings him his great-great grandfather's lullaby. As Zero recovers and as he and Stanley head back to camp, he tells Stanley about his mother. Zero also confesses that he stole Clyde Livingston's shoes; he thought it was better to steal old shoes than brand new ones. In the epilogue, the reader learns that Zero is actually Madame Zeroni's great-great-great grandson, and it broke the Yelnats family curse when Stanley carried Zero up the mountain. Zero uses his money from the first Stanley's suitcase to find his mother

In 1880s Green Lake, Miss Katherine was the town’s beloved schoolteacher. She was beautiful, charming, and an exceptional educator, and so she was beloved by children, parents, and her adult students alike. She also won a special prize at the Fourth of July picnic every year for her spiced peaches. The town expected her to marry Trout Walker, the wealthiest bachelor, but Miss Katherine turned down his advances. Miss Katherine was also friends with Sam, the African-American onion seller. He fixed the schoolhouse over the course of a semester, and at the end, Miss Katherine and Sam discovered that they'd fallen in love. They kissed in the rain one night not long after. Miss Katherine was distraught the next day when Trout Walker led a mob to torch the schoolhouse, and the sheriff refused to do anything about it. She was shocked and disgusted when the sheriff asked for a kiss, and she tried to help Sam escape. Trout Walker shot Sam and rescued her. Three days later, Miss Katherine killed the sheriff and kissed him. She spent the next twenty years as Kissin' Kate Barlow, one of the most feared outlaws in the west. During those twenty years, she attacked a stagecoach carrying the first Stanley Yelnats and stole his suitcase full of valuable bonds and promissory notes, which she buried in Green Lake (which was, by then, a ghost town). Trout Walker came for her Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com ©2019 LitCharts LLC v.006 www.LitCharts.com Page 4 treasure twenty years after Sam's death and she died laughing after refusing to tell him where she buried the first Stanley's suitcase. In the present day, Zero survives in the desert by eating her canned spiced peaches, which survived for over 100 years in Sam's boat on the dried-up lake.

The Warden, the novel's villain, owns and runs Camp Green Lake in the Texas desert. She's a tall, red-haired woman who is soft spoken but nasty: she knows that she's the most powerful person at camp and uses this to intimidate anyone who challenges or bothers her, children and adults alike. When she feels as though Mr. Siris wasting her time by bringing up his stolen sunflower seeds to her, she viciously hits him across the face with her rattlesnake venom-infused nail polish, leaving him in excruciating pain and with massive swelling on his face for days. Though it's never confirmed, the boys of Tent D tell Stanley that the Warden has hidden cameras and microphones around the camp to constantly spy on the teenage inmates. Stanley discovers relatively quickly that the Warden is looking for something specific in the desert. Through flashbacks, the reader learns that the Warden is Trout Walker's descendant and her family has owned the land around Green Lake for generations. When X-Ray "discovers" the lipstick tube from Kate Barlow, the Warden gets excited and proves a terrifying overseer when it becomes clear that she's not going to find what she's looking for. Later, when Zero walks off into the desert alone, the Warden shows just how cruel she is and how little she thinks of her charges: she asks Mr. Pendanski to erase Zero's records, implying that if Zero somehow doesn't die in the desert, he'll somehow die when he returns to camp. Days later, when Stanley and Zero do unearth the first Stanley's suitcase that Kate Barlow buried in the desert, the Warden engages in a standoff for more than twelve hours with the boys, who are surrounded by yellow-spotted lizards. She callously asks Zero why he isn't dead yet and when Ms. Morengo and the Attorney General arrive, she attempts to act as though she cares about the boys and about observing protocol, though her constantly changing story reveals she cares only about herself. After Stanley and Zero leave camp, the Warden is forced to sell Camp Green Lake. 

In the present, Madame Zeroni is described as a "Gypsy woman;" in reality, Madame Zeroni was Egyptian. In mid-1800s Latvia, she was an elderly woman and was good friends with Elya Yelnats. When Elya approached her, sad that he was going to be unable to marry Myra Menke, Madame Zeroni initially cautioned that Myra wasn't worth the trouble. However, against her better judgment, she gave Elya a runty piglet and instructed him to carry the piglet up the nearby mountain every day. There, the piglet was supposed to drink from the stream as Elya sang a special song to the pig. This was supposed to make the pig bigger than Igor's pig, who was Elya's rival for Myra’s hand. On the final day, Elya was to carry Madame Zeroni up the hill (she has only one foot and couldn't climb herself) and sing her the song while she drank from the stream. Madame Zeroni told Elya that if he failed at any of this, his family would be cursed for eternity. Elya did indeed fail to follow through and began to wonder if the curse was real when he arrived in America. Though he asked people often if they knew of anyone named Zeroni, he never found any relatives of hers. In the present, Zero is Madame Zeroni's great-greatgreat grandson.