54 pages • 1 hour read
Carl DeukerA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Joe describes the gathering winter darkness of Seattle and his monotonous routine, broken by three things: English class, gym class, and daily trips to his private gym. Since there is no light in the secret gym, it becomes increasingly difficult for him to see. The shadows are eerie, and Joe says, “the place was starting to creep me out” (91). Seeing the alternative world of the shadows and recognizing they are also real in their own way, Joe begins to understand the alternative world his English teacher is describing in Doctor Faustus. He perceives the presence of that world in the gym with him. With a thunderstorm outside, Joe feels a mist enveloping the gym and himself and perceives that the devil is in the mist. He sinks an uncanny basketball shot from the top of the key, and the spin on the ball makes it bounce right back to him. With darkness and mist growing in the gym, he makes seven straight shots with the ball bouncing back to him each time. He realizes at that point that the devil is tempting him: “He was showing me the power of his world” (93). After two more perfect shots, Joe spontaneously makes a vow: “Give me a full season, give me twenty-four games of this power, and my soul is yours” (93). When his 10th shot, another perfect swish, sails through the hoop, he realizes his covenant has been accepted, and he wonders if now he will belong eternally to the devil.
The world is surreally normal when Joe comes out of the gym. Thus, it is difficult for him to believe he sold his soul, even though the 10 perfect shots were undeniable. Walking down an alley on his way home, Joe encounters four young men who recognize him as the person who ratted out Ross for setting the fire in his yard. When they confront him, Joe is uncharacteristically filled with confident power. He senses an attack coming and successfully takes on three of the four “hoods.” He tells his parents about the fight at dinner because he has injured his hand. He ends up with a fever and misses two days of school. He wonders what has happened to him.
Going back to school on Friday with a swollen hand, Joe rides on the bus with John, who tells him that Sharkey, the starting guard for the basketball team, suffered a season-ending injury. That afternoon in gym class, even with his injured hand, Joe does a wonderful job. Coach Raible calls him into his office and offers him Sharkey’s spot on the team, saying, “I’ve never done anything like this before, Faust, and I’m not sure why I’m doing it now” (98). Elated, Joe takes his release forms home and tells his mother he has made the team.
Joe is scared and not very good at the first few practices. He does not know all the other players, and it takes several days for Joe to get the plays down. John helps him by diagramming them out and explaining them repeatedly. As his play improves, Joe gains confidence and secures his place on the second team. During a final scrimmage before Thanksgiving, he outperforms the starting guard on the first team. Left alone in the gym afterward, Joe finds himself at the very spot on the court where he made his 10 straight shots. He tells himself the good fortune he has been experiencing was simply a fluke. After Thanksgiving, Joe attends a morning pep rally before the first basketball game. After promising to attend the game, his father makes an excuse and does not attend. His mother drives him to the Eastside, where the team goes through its routine. Everyone seems nervous but John. Joe describes the thrill of pregame preparations and the overabundance of adrenaline he is feeling, which makes him press too hard. He relates feeling glad that he probably will not get to see any action during the first game or two.
Eastside’s first game is against Ingraham. Eastside gets down early in a fast-paced game, and Coach Raible refuses to put in his second string to give the starters any rest. By halftime, they are down 40-22. In the locker room, the starters, including John, are clearly winded. Raible only criticizes them. The team is emotionally defeated by the time the second half begins. Joe says, “The fans had given up on us [...] we were losing by twenty to a mediocre team. It promised to be a long season” (106).
After a promising start, Eastside starts fading again. Joe gets to play with two minutes left in the third quarter. He is initially cold and ineffective but warms up quickly and manages to cut the other team’s lead to nine points by the end of the third quarter. He sits back down at the beginning of the fourth quarter. Eventually, down 15 points, Joe gets back into the game with the best of his teammates. Eastside draws closer as the game progresses. Joe steals an inbound pass as time expires and hits an easy layup for a 71-70 Eastside win. On the way home, Joe begins to reflect on how well he had worked with the rest of the starters, something that usually takes a long time to develop. When his father asks Joe to tell him about the game, he realizes he cannot describe the special feeling a team acquires and shares with the crowd at a game. He goes upstairs and reads Doctor Faustus. He rereads Faustus’s vision of hell and the tortures experienced by the damned, trying to decide if it is a ridiculous idea. He remembers an episode of The Twilight Zone in which a man goes to a place where he gets everything he ever wanted and then discovers he is in hell.
At Eastside the next day, Joe finds himself the hero of the students. Even the teachers seem to be cutting him slack. In English, the students discuss the point in Doctor Faustus when the doctor is taken to hell. Joe asks why Faustus never repents, which means he could have enjoyed the benefits given to him by the devil, then attained heaven by repenting, something Joe says Faustus could have done at any point. Another student compares selling one’s soul to the devil to taking heroin—it gradually makes the addict incapable of any other choice. Joe does not accept the comparison, asking himself, “All Faustus has to do is say he’s sorry one time and he’s off the hook. How much willpower does it take to do that” (112).
Coach Raible moves Joe up to first string, which gives him a lot of performance anxiety. He worries constantly about his place on the team, how well he will perform, and what the other players think of him. Once again, his father comes up with a reason not to attend his second game on Thursday evening. This game is against Collins, another private school that had a good record the previous year. The team expects a tough game. Following Raible’s game plan, their opponents mount an early lead and control the game. In the second quarter, the players ignore Raible. John encourages Joe to start taking outside shots, and Eastside quickly takes the lead. They run away with the game, to the extent that the first team can come out in the fourth quarter. Afterward, the stats reveal that Joe scored 30 points. When he gets home after the game, Joe’s mother has gotten him some grapes from a new market selling fresh produce from around the world. The grapes are from India.
After the team wins next two games, with Joe scoring 32 and 35 points, Joe finds himself sitting in the locker room with John and asking if the team is really all that good. John responds that the team is as good as Joe is on a given day. He wrestles again with whether he has actually sold his soul. After the team’s fifth victory, the students in English discuss Doctor Faustus for the last time. Miss Mitchell asks if Faustus had any friends. Joe says he had no friends at the beginning of the story and thus had none to lose after selling his soul. Another student replies that, once he belonged to the devil, Faustus gave up the ability to form true human relationships.
Joe’s parents announce that the three of them are going to Boston so his father can receive the Lasker Award. When Joe reacts against them, they explain this is the most important prize a scientist can receive. Joe attacks his father in the strongest terms. He says basketball is the only thing he is good at and his father has never shown any interest, so why should he show appreciation for his father. His mother tells him later that she has canceled Joe’s reservation for the Boston trip. Going to his old court, Joe is surprised to encounter Ross. In defending his action of burning the cross in Joe’s yard, Ross says he did Joe a favor because Joe hates his dad. After Ross leaves, Joe wonders if Ross was right about him hating his father.
While preparing to travel to Monroe for their sixth game, Joe’s mother tells him she is going to drive him, saying she will bring him luck. He discovers his father is going to attend as well. His father confesses that everything Joe said before was true, that he had not been a great father, that he was going to change that beginning with going to all of Joe’s games. His dad hugs him. Even though he knows he should hug back and encourage his father, Joe cannot bring himself to do it. Once inside the Monroe gym, Joe has a conversation with John that makes him realize his success has not made him happy. The continual wins cause him to worry about the deal he made. If his team lost, he theorizes, the deal would fall through. During the game, Eastside builds a big lead against Monroe that gradually dwindles to a single point. Joe is double-teamed toward the end of the game. He sets us a final play to John that allows Eastside to get a layup and the win. His father drives them to the university rather than going home and says he must go in and work. He tells Joe to drive his mother home. Joe’s mother expresses concern about his father.
Joe remains in Seattle while his parents travel to Boston. With his mother urging him not to forget, Joe watches his father’s interview on TV. While his father looks good with the TV makeup on, he is not as capable of explaining his work as two other scientists who are with him. Before his parents return, Eastside wins two more games to go to 8-0. To surprise his parents, he drives to the airport to pick them up when they return home. Joe tells his father about a discussion in his physics class about genetics. Joe is relieved to have his parents back home.
Joe recounts Christmas day, which is not greatly celebrated since it is the 12th anniversary of his maternal grandfather’s death. The next evening he goes with his parents to see A Christmas Carol, a play his English class is beginning to study. During heavy nighttime rain, he lies in bed comparing Scrooge to Faustus, wondering why Faustus did not repent as Scrooge did. He decides ultimately that Scrooge had less to lose and more to gain by repenting. In doing so he became a new person. If Faustus had repented, according to Joe, he would have gone back to being the same unhappy person he was before.
Eastside travels out of town and participates in a Christmas tournament, which they win easily. John explains that Raible packs the team schedule with easy wins, which means they have to leave Seattle often. The gym reminds him of the Ballard Boys Club, and he has some eerie feelings there. Joe sees a newspaper article saying that Loyal, led by Ross, is ranked number one in the state. He finds out that Eastside has to be invited to the state tournament, which likely will not happen because their league is not thought to be that worthy. Next, they have to play a metro school, Garfield, which won the state tournament the previous year.
Garfield is an inner-city school primarily made up of Black kids. Deuker is honest in describing the white, middle-class mindset that perceives “blacks and crime as going together” (133). “So,” Joe says, “when a white team plays a black team it’s doubly psyched out: the white team thinks the other guys are both better and meaner” (133). It is clear in the locker room before the game that all the Eastside players believe they are going to lose. A part of Joe is willing to lose to put the question of his soul to rest. Listening to the Garfield players in the other locker room, Joe becomes furious at his teammates for having given up before the game begins. He asks Raible for a one-minute team-only meeting. Joe speaks briefly, stirring a little enthusiasm among his teammates. The game is extremely rough and competitive. Raible has no real insight or understanding of the game to offer. Worn down at halftime, Joe and his team improvise and force Garfield to change their game. Weary as the game winds down, Eastside slowly loses its cushion until they lead by only one point. In the final seconds, Joe takes a charge, and Eastside wins to become 12-0. Lying in bed that night, Joe decides he must be getting supernatural assistance.
If Part 2 reflects Joe’s growing misery, Part 3 demonstrates Joe’s ascendancy. It begins with Joe offering his soul to the devil in return for a glorious full season of basketball and continues when he comes out of the gym and fearlessly faces down four boys who want to bully him. Things serendipitously fall into place for Joe, including the fluke injury of another player, giving Joe a spot on the varsity team.
The first basketball game reveals Joe’s reluctance to step up. He assumes initially that he will simply be allowed a few minutes of playing time. As much as anyone else, Joe is surprised when his last-minute heroics result in an initial one-point victory for Eastside.
For fans of basketball, these chapters describing the games Eastside plays are quite revelatory. Deuker describes the ebb and flow of the contest from the perspective of players on the court in a way spectators seldom grasp. He also reveals Joe’s gradual shift from second string to first string to first choice for shooting the ball. Joe’s emergence is not mercurial but rather takes place in fits and starts with missteps. It is not as if the devil is causing every shot Joe takes to fall through the hoop. The distinction means Joe is growing rather than that he is already a complete, dominate player.
In the classroom, as the English students conclude their study of Doctor Faustus, discussion of his damnation brings the subject of recompense home to Joe. He wonders what hell must really be like. He considers the possibility that, if hell is where you get exactly what you want, he might already be in hell. He struggles as well with the notion that Faustus’s damnation cut him off from human fellowship. This ironically comes at a moment when John tells him the team is dependent upon Joe and will only do as well as he does. From this point forward in the story, there are references in Joe’s life that mirror that of Faustus—such as his mother, like Faustus, procuring grapes from India—that cause Joe to perceive that the devil is present and observing.
The Garfield game, the final one before league play begins, is a turning point for Joe in two ways. It is the first time he verbally asserts himself as a leader by giving a pep talk. He also totally abandons Raible’s game plan and guides the team into a narrow victory. Deuker is unsparing in describing the racial overtones of inner-city versus suburban basketball as he describes the Garfield game, and Joe is candid and revealing in his comments.
By Carl Deuker