The Basketball Diaries: The Classic About Growing Up Hip On New York’s Mean Streets

The pursuit of purity is a central theme and the final line of The Basketball Diaries: “I just want to be pure” (211). Purity is the absence of filth, trauma, and immorality, with Jim’s actions being its antithesis. Jim self-sabotages his desire for purity by taking drugs and becoming addicted to them. He spends most of his time doing drugs and committing crimes to obtain more drugs (or occasionally for fun). While most people would consider doing drugs a bad habit, Jim uses them to feel pure. He discusses the matter with his friend Brian: When Brian remarks that a person high on heroin curls up like a fetus, Jim agrees that this is the entire point of doing so. For Jim, heroin provides a return to innocence, a state before society corrupted and traumatized him. LSD provides a slightly different feeling, but one still related to purity; he uses it to lose himself and connect with nature.

Teenagers often experience a loss of morality and innocence as they test the waters of adulthood. Jim remarks on this phenomenon, noting that he is breaking many rules he made for himself as a child. He tries desperately to retain his purity through drugs but fails when addiction consumes him. A 13-year-old Jim’s behavior is immoral but still relatively harmless and more closely resembles mischief. By the time Jim is 16, he is fully immersed in drug culture. He begins sex work, holding people up with a knife, is sent to jail for three months, and eventually becomes complacent towards his own addiction and the acts he commits to maintain it.

The idea of purity is upheld in Jim’s love for nature, sex, and writing—particularly writing poetry. In one such instance, Jim writes a poem about the way the sun shines off a girl’s marbles while high on LSD. He strips naked on his roof to experience a purer form of himself. To him, nature is a place apart from the corruption of politics, war, and everyday culture. He longs to be in nature and spends a great deal of his time taking buses and trains out to various locations to get high. Jim is not afraid of saying what he thinks, his writing making full use of vulgar language and sheer honesty: “I’m zonked on the swings in the playground slugging Pepsi as they come in to get some water to take up the hill to shoot up” (142). This is another means through which Jim strives for purity. He does not believe in hiding from himself or the truths of the world, as he observes the “thousand goofs” (209) around him who seem to be complacent in the face of oppression and fear. In both blatant and subtle ways, Jim characterizes himself through his pursuit of purity, his tragic flaw.