Sin Leads To Guilt In Gary Soto's 'The Pie'

When I was little, I knew that I would not get away with stealing because I thought that God saw everything, and I did not want to commit a sin. Those reasons made me immensely careful with my actions. Even though young Gary from the short story, “The Pie,” knew that stealing was sinning, he stole a pie despite those reasons because he thought that it would make him happy. He later discovered that he was wrong. Through symbolized versions of God and Gary’s different emotions shown through parallel episodes, Gary Soto exhibits that sin leads to guilt and not happiness in his short story, “The Pie.”
In “The Pie,” Soto symbolically represented God and Jesus to maintain the theme that sin leads to guilt. After young Gary stole a pie, he was …show more content…
He later said that,“he watched my fingers greedily push big chunks of pie down my throat,” (Soto paragraph 6). This sentence is a parallel episode because each time he ate more pie, he realized something new. He said that he “greedily” ate the pie, which means that he knew that he was being selfish by not sharing the pie. “My face was sticky with guilt,” ( Soto paragraph 7) shows that after he ate all of his pie, he realized that he felt guilt instead of happiness, which he hadn’t anticipated. Furthermore, each time he ate more pie, he felt more guilt than happiness, because he explained that he felt bad for not sharing with Cross-Eyed Johnny, who was really Jesus. Near the end of “The Pie,” Gary said that “Mrs.Hancock...knew. My mom...knew” (Soto paragraph 7). This showed that Gary had finally realized after eating his pie that he was guilty. This is because he had a sense of paranoia. He wouldn’t have paranoia if he was not guilty. Altogether, by using parallel episodes, young Gary found out from his sin that no matter how good he felt committing his sin at the moment, it only brought him guilt in the …show more content…
This theme shows that when people try finding happiness in bad ways, the outcome of the sin is guilt, no matter how good it felt committing the sin. For me, I learned that sin lead to guilt when I was little, because I was a very cautious child and I knew I would get in trouble for lying and stealing. In contrast, in young Gary Soto’s case, he stole because he wasn’t as cautious as I was, yet he still learned when he was older that when he sinned, happiness didn’t come from it, but