Expectations
When a teacher says, “We’re going on an all day field trip next Friday!!!” students get excited. A field trip means getting out of school and going somewhere fun. Sadly, then they say, “We’re going to the park to pick up trash for Earth Day! And then we will write an essay on why it is important to keep the Earth clean. Five paragraphs!” then all their dreams of having any fun next Friday are gone. This is similar to how the boy with the jacket felt in Gary Soto’s “The Jacket.” He was hoping for a leather jacket that was cool enough to “hold down a small town”. Sadly, he instead got a ugly greenish brown jacket, that looked like “day old guacamole”. Soto uses literary elements, such as conflict, setting and symbolism show that one can often let their expectations get in the way of their happiness.
First, Soto uses conflict to reveal the theme, expectations get in the way of our happiness. The boy goes through many internal and external conflicts. The jacket is an external conflict. Because of the jacket, the boy is unpopular and treated poorly. However, in his mind, more than outside it, he is very ugly. In middle school, he was bullied and hung out with the “ugly boys” at recess because he had a poor attitude about his jacket. These conflicts were born when he got a hideous jacket that he wasn 't expecting. Soto says, “in fifth and sixth grades when you either danced like a champ or pressed yourself against a greasy wall, bitter as a penny...” The boy believes