Guilty Six Year Old by Gary Soto

Exploring the minds of six-year-olds can be a very interesting experience. Gary Soto narrates this story as a young boy at a time when he seems to be young and foolish. Soto does a great job of showing the contrast between right and wrong through a child’s eyes. He successfully conveys the guilt of the boy through his use of imagery, repetition and contrast. He uses these tools to get the reader into the mind of the boy so that they can explore his guilt and thoughts.

He first gets the reader to understand what he is thinking with the use of imagery. He starts out with a darker point, “my sweet tooth gleaming and the juice of guilt wetting my underarms.” This is showing that he had already committed the crime in his mind before he had actually performed the act. When the sat down to eat his pie, he gives the image of a nice summer day by thinking, “The sun wavered between the branches of a yellowish sycamore.” He shows that he is happy to be finally eating the pie that he stole. He showed his guilt when he says, “I wiped my sticky fingers on the grass and rolled my tongue over the corners of my mouth.” This is depicting an allusion to the popular phrase “There is blood on your hands”, which means that you are guilty of something. He also shows his guilt by thinking, “A squirrel nailed itself high on the trunk, where it forked into two large bark-scabbed limbs.” This is a biblical allusion to the cross on which Jesus was crucified. These images help to relay his feeling of guilt.

One of the major contrasts in the passage is Soto’s greed versus politeness. This is best exemplified when his neighbor, Cross-Eyed Johnny politely asks for a piece of pie, and Soto rudely shoves him away. Then Cross-Eyed Johnny says to him “Your hands...

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...ition is when Soto is sitting on his lawn after eating the pie, and he looks around. "A car honked, and the driver knew. Mrs. Hancock stood on her lawn, hands on her hip, and she knew. My mom, peeling a mountain of potatoes at the Redi-Spud factory, knew." The repetition of knew shows how paranoid Soto is that people are going to find out that he had stolen the pie. Paranoia almost always comes out in people when they are feeling guilty about doing something. It also shows that Soto is not very good at disguising the guilt that he feels.

Soto feels terribly guilty about stealing the pie from the store. He shows this in many different ways. There are many rhetorical devices in the passage, and they are used to show the guilt he had when he stole that pie. Imagery, contrasts, and repetition were some of the biggest topic in which he used to express his guilt and sin.