A Summer Life By Gary Soto Analysis

Shift of Innocence The mind of a young child is nearly unfathomable. To attempt to delve into its depths is, typically, a fool’s errand; and yet, somehow, certain authors manage to reach back through the years and call to mind old memories. They are able to spin stories from these dream-recollections. One of these authors, Gary Soto, performs this feat in a passage from his book, A Summer Life. Soto twists words and sentences to perfectly recreate his childhood experience.Through imagery, the guilt he felt in the pit of his six-year-old stomach becomes as real to us as the weight we feel in our own chests from time to time. The repetition also serves to illustrate the shame, coarse and thick. The snippets of dialogue and his rich use of language …show more content…
The world is rife with imagery. Nearly everything can be explained with some type of sensory detail. Emotions can be described as heavy, light, deep, shallow, hot, cold, and any other number of adjectives derived from nature and things seen by the eye. Soto employs imagery to bring the readers from the beginning to his final destination. Soto’s six-year-old self, under the porch, is innocent and naive. The whole of Soto’s first paragraph is filled with white summer images, such as “angels flopping on the backyard”, “flowery dust”, and “bark-scarred limbs”. Through the use of these pictures, he demonstrates his innocence. By using imagery with the connotation of airy, bright, childhood, he doesn’t allow the thought of this young boy being mature to enter our minds. As the piece continues, the tone of the imagery subtly shifts, from the “cool shadows” underneath the porch to the “glare of a pie tin on a hot day”. The beginning of this shift is as Soto narrates: "The slop was sweet and gold-colored in the sun” …show more content…
He elongates and shortens sentences to change the feeling of his piece. Before the sin, his sentences are fairly short and simple, symbolizing his simplistic worldview and innocence. While he is contemplating the pie, Soto stretches the sentences longer and longer, showing that he is expanding his horizons slightly. By changing the sentence length and complexity throughout the narrative, Soto demonstrates the fluctuation of the thoughts of this child. When he is enjoying the pie, Soto uses a sentence of middle-length and complexity, saying, “I realized right then and there, in my sixth year, in my tiny body of two hundred bones and three or four sins, that the best things in life came stolen” (44). Gary Soto fluctuates the structure of sentences, controlling them to the end that the rhythm and feeling of the piece communicates his portrayal of childlike guilt clearly. He also uses the brief snippets of dialogue between he and another boy on his block to convey this. The boy tells him that Soto has dirty hands, and Soto remarks that he felt bad about not sharing. Through the fleeting conversation the two share, Soto imparts the hasty and hurried nature of sin. The bad feelings of shame linger, as shown by Soto’s later remarks and rhetorical devices, but the act is unbearably quick. Through language usage and dialogue, Soto further communicates his memory of what a six-year-old’s