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Gary Soto The Pie Analysis

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In his short story “The Pie,” Gary Soto recreates the experience of his guilty six year-old self through the use of cachet word choice and contrasting subtle and stark imagery. Soto uses articulate diction to gracefully illustrate the feeling of guilt and the pleasure derived from it that he encounters after the stealing of the apple pie. He explains that he felt an almost inhuman, burning desire for the pie when “stood before a race of [them]” and “nearly wept trying to choose” one. The “juice of guilt [that] wett[ed] his underarms” is, in a discrete manner, warning him of the repercussions that will arise as a consequence of his evil deed, but he does not heed to it and soon winds up “work[ing] [his] cleanest finger into the pie.” He plunges his last bit of purity and innocence into sin even in “the proximity of God,” which shows how innocent and naïve most children can be. He experiences utmost pleasure while eating, as he later states that he “felt like crying because it was about the best thing [he] ever tasted.” As he retrospects on the terrific taste of the pie, the ‘pleasure’ aspect of ‘guilty pleasure’ is revealed to the reader. Furthermore, when Soto is finished eating the pie, the weight of his wronging suddenly is thrust upon him, and suddenly when “tears blur [his] eyes as [he] remembered the grocer’s forehead,” he is not able to accept what he has done and so “crawl[s]...in the…shadows” underneath his house, lying there until “he was cold.” This represents the heat of sin leaving his body as he turns back to his faith by “listening to the howling sounds of...God”, which ultimately prepares him to “[rise] from his knee” and “[crawl] back into the light” of …show more content…

The diction and imagery work together to bring to life the time that he made his momentous decision to steal the pie the pie and illustrate to us the guilt that follows his misguided

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Yet, after the deed was done, he recounts, “..but the bottle caps bored me…” and once again, he escaped to the basement, the place he goes as he looks for something to do. These actions alone highlight the pitfalls of sin; as he tried in desperation to save himself from boredom, he trapped himself once more where, after a brief, sweet hiatus, the feeling soon returned—and not only that, trapped him. After he ate the pie, few things, if anything, could save him from his boredom. There was nothing he could do, at that point, beyond sit with his internal reconciliation. Furthermore, the audience witnesses Soto’s change in perspective as the idea of “sin” itself actualizes from his actions.

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The repetition of “will” in the third stanza also implies the absoluteness of the pie’s positive reception, which further contributes to the speaker’s bitter tone as the same cannot be said for his poetry. The speaker also states that his friends ask “why in the world did you make only one”, which suggests a demand for his pie, which is the contrary situation for his poetry. He then switches to a tone of resignation in the penultimate stanza as he is forced to accept the fact that

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