Themes In Gary Forto's The Jacket By Gary Soto

This short story called The Jacket by Gary Soto is about a young American boy who lives most of his younger life insecure of his looks and what he wears, in representation of what it was like for foreigners in America at the time. The author of this works was born April 12, 1952 in Fresno, California. Gary’s father and mother were Mexican-American and his father died in 1957. His family struggled to find work but then in high school Gary found an interest in poetry and decided to pursue his passion into college. He then attended Fresno City College and California State University where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in English. Soto then ended up teaching at California State University but is now no longer teaching. The Jacket starts off …show more content…
That day he then gets a D on his sixth grade math quiz and during his morning recess he is bullied and pushed to the ground. His best friend just watched him lay there while some girls off to the side stood together and giggled while watching him. Even the teachers were standing grouped together talking about how he looked silly in his new jacket. During lunch, even though it was freezing out, he decided to go outside without a jacket and play kickball. When he got back inside he threw on his jacket to warm up again. Then the fire bell rang and he walked outside with the rest of the school thinking about how everyone was whispering about him and his ugly green jacket. He was so worried about what others thought about his jacket that he couldn’t even do his homework. He ended up getting C’s on a lot of his quizzes and could never remember the information he needed to know for his tests. The girls in his grade neglected him and always went for the boys with the cool jackets …show more content…
Then the cab driver asks Takaki how long he has lived in the United States and Takaki responds by he was born in the United States. The cab driver is confused by this since Takaki looks Japanese and it shows how Americans still hadn’t accepted the fact that foreigners were now living within their communities. This was a sign of discrimination and this theme is similar to The Jacket because of how the kid was discriminated against something he couldn’t help. Now the kid was wearing something that could be removed but because of his family's conditions, he was not able to afford a different jacket. This caused other kids to look at him in a different way since he didn’t have cool jackets like them. While these two stories shared a somewhat similar theme I think in a way the discrimination was reversed from A Different Mirror to The Jacket. The reason for this is because in A Different Mirror Takaki was discriminated against from others around him but in The Jacket, while he still was discriminated against from others, I think a lot of his failures and faults were from him not accepting his own conditions. Not accepting himself lead to bigger problems than the problems that arose from the other people around him not accepting