Gary Soto Symbolism

In A Summer Life by Gary Soto, the reader is taken on a journey through Soto’s childhood. The story starts when Soto is at age four and continues on until he is a mature seventeen year old. The impressive way in which Gary Soto writes this story provides the reader with enough details that they feel like they know Gary personally. That is especially true about the last chapter, “The River”. The symbolism and literary devices used in this chapter make it the best chapter of the story.
One reason this chapter stands out is because of the symbolism the author uses. The predominant symbolism in this chapter is the Los Angeles River. This river reminds Gary of the canal in his hometown of Fresno that him and his best friend, Scott, used to visit. It symbolizes all of the ups and downs in Soto’s life, that are simply just a party of growing up. Here he is now, several years later, standing at a river similar to the one in his hometown. However, now, he’s older, more mature, and has different things going on in his life. The river reflects who he is as a person, as well as all of the events that happened in his childhood that shaped him into the

As Gary and Scott are on their way to Los Angeles, traveling “by Greyhound up highway 99 with it’s splattered dogs and wind-hurt oleanders” (Soto 147), the author uses a variety of literary devices to give the reader a better idea of what is going on. Similarly, when they go to the concert at the Palladium in Hollywood the author describes the venue and says that there are “mobs of young people in leather vests, bell-bottoms, beads, Jesus thongs, tie-dyed T-shirts, and crowns of flower” (Soto 148). This description helps me to visualize the atmosphere of where they are. Because this chapter had an abundant amount of detail, it really stood out from other chapters as being the