The Journey of a Jacket
The pivotal moment in Gary Soto’s coming-of-age essay, “The Jacket,” occurs when the narrator has the
opportunity to lose his ugly, old, ill-fitting jacket forever, having thrown it over the fence in the alley. At this point, he
can tell his mother he lost it, but this is not what he does. Rather, he elects to take the jacket home, cradling it forsaken
child in his lap. At that moment, the narrator recognizes the jacket is more than just a coat. It is his Hispanic culture. The
culture of his mother. From the essay, the reader learns that an inherited culture is the primary core of identity, and it
cannot be denied, altered, or forgotten.
Prior to the pivotal moment, the narrator of “The Jacket” fails to recognize he even has an identity, much less a
cultural identity. He sees himself as a nothing-a nobody. This is illustrated by the fact that over and over, he describes his
breath- the very essence of life - in terms of nothingness. After putting the jacket on for the first time, he comments
about how he “watched the white puffs of my breath thin to nothing.” Then, again, after wearing the jacket for three
years, he shows the tattered jacket to his mother who remains unmoved to get him a new one. He repeats his empty
feelings and says he escapes to “the alley to think bad thoughts and watch my breath puff white and disappear.”
Through this repetition, the reader gets a sense the breath is symbolic for his life and his identity. The breath seems to
represent the narrator and how he feels like “nothing” or like he can “disappear” within the world around him,
becoming nothing. Early in the essay, the narrator longs to combat that feeling of being a nobody without an identity.
He hopes to obtain the jacket of a powerful somebody: a biker. He tells his mother he wants a new jacket “like bikers
wear: black leather and silver studs with enough belts to hold down a small town.” In his mind, the power to go from a
no body to a somebody radiates from the strapping belted jacket that demands, “Respect me!” Having money to buy
“leather” emboldened with shiny “silver” ignores the poverty suffered living as a Hispanic but will definitely give him the
strong sense of identity needed to fill the vacuum left by his identity crisis.
The narrator’s vacuity changes when he starts to see that relationships define his identity. As the jacket begins
to grow old, uglier, and shriveling, the narrator begins to contrast physically with it. After three years of wearing the
jacket, he concludes the jacket “had become the ugly brother who tagged along where I went.” If the jacket is the
“brother who tagged along,” it only follows that the narrator’s new identity is that of big brother. As if growing into the
bad biker he always wanted to be, the narrator proceeds to describe his big “brother” self as having a “chest puffed up
with muscle,” “fleshy hammers” as “brave” hands, and “fingers already hardening for the coming fights.” The analogy of
jacket as brother is needed to help the reader understand the significance of the pivotal moment. By forming a
relationship with the jacket as his brother, the narrator opens the door to the relationship that is at the heart of the
essay and the heart of his cultural identity – the relationship with is mother.
The narrator tries to distance himself from his mother and his culture. This is symbolically represented every
time the mother is mentioned. On two different occasions in the story, the mother is portrayed as being in a sort of fog
separate from the narrator. The first time occurs when he tries to explain the biker jacket as says the conversation, “We
were in the kitchen, steam on the windows from her cooking.” Then, in the final paragraph, the steam imagery reoccurs
when the narrator describes the dinner he has after deciding to rescue the jacket from the alley: “I was called to dinner:
steam silvered my mother’s glasses as she said grace.” In both instances, it is as if the narrator is trying to represent a
wall of fog between his mother and his identity. There is a “steam” that prevents them from truly seeming as one. And
yet there is a major difference in tone between the first incident and the second. It the first instance, after noting the
steam, the narrator says, “I thought she understood for sure the kind I wanted…I closed the door to her voice.” He is
sure she listened to him but finds she did not when he gets the green jacket. There is a tone of rejection of his mother
when he “closed the door to her voice.” Yet, the second instance in the final paragraph is much different in tone. He
proceeds to describe the meal his mother has cooked. He first notes the powdered milk – a sign of their poverty – as
making him gag. But then, earnestly and almost fervently describes the Mexican food unique to his culture – inherited
from Mom. In the one line, “…eagerly ate big rips of buttered tortilla that held scooped up beans.” The tortilla and the
beans are some of the only instances in the whole essay of a sense of comfort and joy the narrator has through this
whole experience. The author uses repetition, placing the mother in the kitchen cooking, to show the connection the
narrator has to his mother through her food. The delicious food of his Mexican culture and the poverty of the powdered
milk combine to remind him of both the positive and negative aspects of the cultural identity he inherited from his
mother and that will be with him forever. If the narrator had not had the pivotal moment with his jacket – to discard it
forever or keep and care for it like a little brother – he would not have valued his real, sometimes sad, relationships with
it, his mother who provided for him, and his Hispanic culture.
Ultimately, the pivotal moment of this coming of age story illuminates the significance of a cultural identity in
one’s psychological growth. The journey of acceptance symbolic in “The Jacket” by Gary Soto gives the reader the
opportunity to think about when he was embarrassed by a part of his life to when he is forgives it and is ultimately
defined by it.