The Jacket By Gary Soto Essay

First, she gave her personal experience that she “wore one for 13 years, and cursed it every single day…. But this is exactly why I'm such a fan.” She is trying to persuade the reader that uniforms are not as bad as one thinks because she has experienced them, and now she is a fan of it. She encourages people to support school uniforms by listing various benefits of it, and how it shapes student to be better citizens. She also uses rhetorical question when she says that “where else could we learn a lesson in sacrifice and serving the common good with so little actual sacrifice? So you look bad at school. Get over it.” Over here, the author presents a little argument for people who complain that uniforms are

The short story The Pedestrian is an intriguing story that takes place in the future. This story suggests that if the world continues the progress that it is now then we will become no more than humans who are doing nothing with our lives. It shows how people would seclude themselves from others and begin to stop caring for others. Is this actually a possibility in the future?

Although he believed it was ugly, he continued wearing the jacket since he has no choice. All the more he felt bad because wicked things happen continuously. He was unable to do his homework, he got C’s in most of his quizzes, and he even forgot the capitals and rivers of South America. The girls who were previously friendly to him blew away like loose flowers following boys in neat jackets (Soto, 474). Despite of the bad lucks it caused him, he still wore the jacket for three years and has tagged along with him wherever he went. And all those years he was unlucky

They are obviously used to show that Soto is nervous and moving around quickly because there is a lot of action going on at the time. However, in the some of the last paragraphs there are many more complex sentences, which are used to show that Soto has returned to his state of boredom and also to express that there is not much going on inside Soto’s head..

An example of the insecurity that is demonstrated in the story is mentioned when the narrator's teachers were of "no help, they looked [his] way and talked about how foolish [he] looked in [his] new jacket" (paragraph 7). The narrator feels insecure because of his assumptions that his teachers are making fun of him when in fact, they are not noticing him at all. Further more, he continues to say, "At lunchtime I stayed with the ugly boys leaned against the chain link fence… our mouths" (paragraph 9). This statement proves the narrator is having bad luck because of the jacket and is destroying his reputation at school. A third reason why the jacket symbolizes insecurity is because the fact that his classmates see him with the jacket, he feels that they "…say out loud "man that's ugly", I heard the buzz-buzz of gossip and even laughter"

Henry Luong Professor Lassiter English 101 15 January 2015 To Compare and To Contrast The two stories, “The Back of the Bus” by Mary Mebane and “Like Mexicans” by Gary Soto, are alike. In the story, “The Back of the Bus,” Mary describes a time when she was younger; she lived in a time when there was legal segregation and racism was at a peak. She also talks about an experience she had on a bus; a black man refuse to give up his seat and the bus driver threatens to take him to the police.

One major trademark of Gary Soto’s works is his use of the importance of family in his stories. Readers can feel and understand his passion and appreciation for family. Often, Gary uses family to tell stories about his upbringing and as a sense of pride in his stories. In A Summer Life, he says, “My brother showed me his palm, where a sliver had gone in quick as a stitch on a sewing machine when he climbed the rabbit hutch at the Molinas’ house” (Soto 14). This quote is an example of his close relationship to his family and his adventurous upbringing in Fresno, California. Later in A Summer Life, Soto says, “My face was hot, my hair sweaty, but nothing scary seemed to happen” (Soto 20). This quote once again shows that Soto had a very adventurous upbringing, and he enjoyed being able to go out and explore for himself at a young age. Soto’s family life has always been important to him, but his family life has also suffered heartbreak and adversity. According

Gary Soto, a Mexican-American author, was born in 1952 in Fresno, California. His parents were both Mexican-American. Soto did not expect a lot from his life; he imagined he would "’marry Mexican poor, work Mexican hours, and in the end die a Mexican death, broke and in despair’" (Lee). Instead, he became a great writer of poems and short stories. James Sullivan describes Soto as “one of the most important voices in Chicano literature” and Don Lee counts Soto as “one of the best Chicano poets of his time” having published over twenty books. Soto, an established writer, uses experiences from his life and his observations of his community to write stories about life in a Mexican-American community with characters and conflicts that are relatable.

From the beginning of the poem, Soto depicts himself as a ten year old who wanted attention. He also depicts the era by which the setting of the poem is written. He states, “At ten I wanted fame”, the word “fame” standing for his intense need for attention (1). In the next line he said, “I had a comb / And two Coke bottles, a tube of Bryl-cream” (1-2). By this he meant, he had thick glasses and slicked back hair, and for that era, thick glasses were for nerds, and the slicked back hair was the fashion in the 1950’s. In addition, a slang word in the 1950’s was “Daddy-O”, who by which Soto refers to a priest (17). He states, ‘“No way / Daddy-O’ to an imaginary priest” (16-17). Since Soto uses the word priest, and not pastor or reverend, this indicates the person for whom he imagined calling “Daddy-O” was a Catholic male (17). Soto uses the word “Chale” toward the imaginary priest, which

In fact, we can see this when Soto writes, “But she just sat on the porch swing, letting anxiety eat a hole in her soul.” In this short story it helps build the theme because Soto uses the quote to connect to the theme because when he shows that her fear for her parents is growing he says that it’s so extreme that her “anxiety is eating a hole in her soul” but maybe the fear that her family dying and leaving her all alone could be the hole. She may fear that if her family is gone that she will be left with this void that she can never fill, and when they die they will take a part of her with them. Adding onto that, he sends a message that appears when she says her family is obnoxious and annoying she does, deep down in her heart, care about them. This helps develop the theme by presenting to us that she is a person just like everybody else and that she has feelings and emotions just like you and me. She gets worried, frightened, and

Nevertheless, as we grew, my classmates and I no longer had the same attitude towards each other. These unaware toddlers, subliminally primed to perceive the world around them as their parents regard as fit, discerned the social ranking of each person in the room. I existed as the lonely piece in the puzzle box that didn’t fit anywhere, an estranged visitor who misplaced herself into their little bubble of friends. I hardly received any invitations to affairs, such as American Girl Doll parties and pool parties, as result of the monetary gap of what I could afford and the moral differences between my family and that of my peers. My mom pushed me to ask if I could attend and suggested I bring one of my stuffed animals instead, which of course came off as an atrocious idea to me at age 7. I did not desire the connotation that bringing a regular stuffed animal to a party with girls who had hundred dollar dolls would cause. Sour and ungrateful feelings began to plague my head due to what I had, in comparison to those around me, did not constitute enough. I only became increasingly alien to those around me as we all grew together and the separating factors in our lives were no longer shallow material attributes as in what plantations a person’s ancestors owned, how much money a person’s family had, or where a person had lived all their life. I could only imagine how unfathomable nonreligious views appear to those who have been

Gary Soto was born in April 12, 1952, and he was raised in Fresno, California. Gary is a Mexican-American author and poet. His mother and father were Angie Soto and Manuel Soto. Gary writes books for kids from K-12 and he even writes books for adults. He also writes books in various genres such as fiction, poetry, humor, short stories, autobiography and more. Gary Soto is an author that has works that can be enjoyed by kids, teens, and adults.

Gary Soto, who among many things was a Mexican-American poet, many times wrote about what he knew best: his life. Growing up as a Chicano in America in the 50s and 60s, Soto worked in fields as a laborer from a young age. It is evident that coming from a Hispanic working class family greatly influenced his poem “Ambition”. As he is known for, Soto's poem is filled with imagery of everyday life, while harping on important details and themes of things that he may have seen around him., but in this instance, there was a bit of confusion. To begin with, the poem “Ambition” starts off with the line "For years our ambition was to eat/Chicken"(1-2). Without further analysis, at this point the reader is most likely confused, much like I was. Chicken? How could eating be one's goal, one's aspiration in life? The word ambition is usually associated with lofty goals. It would not seem out of place to say that one's ambition was to become a doctor or to make a better life for oneself. So the speaker in the poem could not truly believe that all that he wanted in life was to eat chicken. The outlandishness of this statement seems to be the speaker pointing huge arrows towards places in the poem that invoke deeper meaning to

Taking place in a countryside home, W.W. Jacobs’s short story “The Monkey’s Paw” illustrates the White family’s two-day interaction with a seemingly innocent mummified monkey's paw. Each character presented in the short story represents natural human traits that can prove to be negative when greed and curiosity are involved. The use of symbolism throughout the story proves to be vital to the reader, as it allows him or her to understand the importance of every action done to the monkey’s paw has an opposite consequence. This correlates to everyone on Earth’s predetermined fate and the problems that an individual could face when greed overcomes their needs, even when it is for a better or worse life. When individuals are consumed by greed, like the White family, they must accept the consequences no matter how severe it is when it is something they truly seek in life.

During our life we construct many different identities of who we want to portray ourselves as to the rest of society; fashion plays a vital role in generating who we are. With the ideas from Storry and Childs they state that “the way that we dress can either serve to confirm or to subvert various facets of our identities, such as our gender,