When analyzing a text, the title is a great indication of what the book is about, more or less. In this case, the title of the book appears in Chapter Three, during the narrator's arduous childhood. The scene in question tells of her father disappointing the family in some way. Although there are many possible things to criticize about him, the author just says, "When I grow up I am going to be the gangster we are all looking for." There is the central drama of the novel, and the center of its meaning. The story is about the resilience of the human spirit, and the author's decision to choose hope for herself in the absence of her father's guidance.
In other words, the writer was so moved by the sacrifices of her father, that she feels moved to forgive him for various aspects of his moral failures as an American father in the working class. This disappointment must have been at the very center of an emotionally difficult childhood. Here is the greatest symbol in the novel to that effect: One time, when the narrator's parents are screaming, the mother cuts her hair off, and a crowd forms outside to see what's going on. The narrator essentially says, "No, I'm not going to let you laugh and point at my parent's shame, but I'll dance for you instead." Then she does dance for them.
It's an account of how an artist was born from tragedy. It shows the relationship between entertainment and pain, and the way that doing a silly dance might actually be akin to a magic spell that she can put over a crowd of fascinated children, and she finds power in the ability to captivate an audience. Why? Because it helps her to hide the shame of her painful existence and the confusion she must feel with parents who scream so loud they attract an audience in the first place.
In many ways, the novel continues to be about that basic relationship. It could be seen as an apology for her artistic nature, where apology means 'defense,' in the Greek sense of the word, as in, she's explaining to us why she began to create art in the first place.
In the next chapter, she says something to this effect. She says that her father's hunger for life is within her, and even as he fades away from life, becoming smaller, she is growing in his legacy, and so he lives on with her and her ferocious appetite for life. In other words, the "Gangster" she discovers within herself is her father within her, still hungry for more life than he can afford. This appetite is the source of the author's source of creativity and her hunger for beauty.
