A Summer Life By Gary Soto Essay

In this excerpt from A Summer Life, Gary Soto recounts a memory from his early childhood. As he walks through his memory, Soto recalls the effects sin had on his still developing mind; however, looking back as an adult, Soto realizes that the root cause of his naive fear was his Catholic upbringing. Soto satirizes the Church in an attempt to prevent the perpetuation of the overbearing “Catholic guilt” on younger generations through the use of this powerful anecdote. From the beginning of the excerpt, it is quite easy to see that Gary Soto was raised in a Christian household. He states that he “was holy in almost every bone” thereby implying through hyperbole that he held a very extreme point of view when it came to his religious purity, yet he gives a caveat with the word “almost.” That caveat foreshadows the “horrible” sin that he will soon commit. Soto also tells of the “angels… on the backyard grass” or the “howl[ing] underneath [his] house” so as to exhibit the pervasiveness of God in his young mind and life. In the next section, Soto shifts to a more graven tone. He begins to recount the story of how he stole a pie; however, Soto has already shifted the blame through the …show more content…
Soto then utilizes parallelism to show his paranoia. He believes that everybody knows what he has done wrong, and his parallelism speeds up how the article is read creating the sense of desperation and fear that he experienced as a boy. He agains repeats the symbol of the shadow of an angel; there is always something present, watching him and every bad deed he commits. The angel he sees is compounding on the paranoia and fears that have been present in the excerpt. Soto then mentions that he “was bored and thirsty,” referring back to how “boredom made him sin,” yet he felt the ramifications of his actions through his