76 pages • 2 hours read
Gary SotoBuried Onions
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Gary Soto’s young adult novel about life in poverty-heavy south Fresno begins with the main character, Eddie, sitting at a picnic table at Fresno City College. Soto places him near the mortuary studies department, and he begins thinking of all the dead people he has known and all the death-related sensory impressions nearby, right down to the mortuary studies students themselves. We see Eddie’s vivid yet untapped imagination early, as he envisions how the “students of that ghoulish business had to stand in the sun and quiver until the heat returned to their bodies” (2). He also unveils his “theory about a huge onion buried under the city,” a “remarkable bulb of sadness” (2).
Eddie leaves the campus to return to his apartment. We learn he is no longer a student studying air conditioning, having dropped out of college shortly after his cousin, Jesus, was murdered. Eddie heard about the murder from an acquaintance of his, Angel, a friend of Jesus and someone who Eddie trusts little.
Eddie describes his apartment—the swamp cooler, a couch and two chairs, a fake art print of a ship on his wall, a refrigerator, and a rose flowering near the entrance. He explains that his mom moved to Merced and writes him infrequently, then describes his neighborhood. With a small note of pride, he says, “[We] know each other, marry each other, and hurt each other over small matters. . .we never commit suicide like the gavachos who can’t take it” (4).
On his own except for an aunt and a friend or two, Eddie acquires occasional work by bicycling up to the north side of town to paint house numbers on curbs. He carries black and white spray cans with him in his bike basket. He gets stopped by Lupe, someone who does drugs, brings trouble, and knows Angel, an acquaintance of Eddie’s. Lupe tells Eddie that Angel wants to see him. Eddie heads to the old playground, a neutral meeting place that even older teens still use as a safe space. Angel is out to get revenge for Jesus’s murder, and wants Eddie to help. Eddie has worked hard to walk a straight line and wants no part of it, whereas Angel runs various scams to get money when he needs it, and often steals. Revenge killing is just one more task for him. Eddie notices what looks like a spider mark on Angel’s neck, a sign of injecting drugs. He says he wants nothing to do with the revenge plan, adding that “whoever did Jesus” will “die soon enough” (12).
The two split up and Eddie heads north again, to his painting work. He shows us a typical customer, a booze-drinking middle-class white man who is loath to part with his money and has skin “as smooth as a sheet of onion” (15). Moving on to the next job, and then the next, Eddie manages to paint six curbs that day. He returns home to the apartment and a phone call from his aunt. In a big surprise to Eddie, she, like Angel, wants Eddie to seek vengeance for Jesus’s death.
Chapter 2 Summary
Eddie sits at home wondering about God, and believes that “sometimes God listens” to prayer (18). He pictures God’s body in India or Africa or perhaps in his own neighborhood, “sprawled on the floor, glass all around because of a drive-by” (18). He thinks of Juan, killed haphazardly by industrial rollers while doing what “the Bible and his family asked of him” (18). The phone rings. Eddie, assuming it’s his aunt again, darts out of the apartment to his bicycle.
When next we see him, Eddie is excited. The day before, an old man, Mr. Stiles, whose curb Eddie had painted, has asked him to come back and do some landscaping work. To him, this is a real job and an honor. Eddie is polite, eager, and optimistic. Mr. Stiles sets him to digging a hole for a birch tree. All seems to go well, until a child who seems to not like Eddie asks him about the kind of tree it is. A few days later, when Eddie arrives, Mr. Stiles appears angry, and Eddie finds out that the boy has told his mother that Eddie was using bad language, specifically the word “bitch.” Eddie knows that this is a confusion with “birch,” since he had already corrected the boy when he accused him of bad language, telling him it was birch, not bitch, but the boy had complained about him anyway (22-23). Mr. Stiles takes the swearing accusation very seriously. Eddie carefully and painstakingly explains the word confusion to Mr. Stiles, and together they go to apologize to the boy’s mother. Eddie views the boy on the tricycle as a punk, thinking (correctly so) that the boy is deliberately causing him trouble.
After the apology and discussion with Mr. Stiles about language, all is again well for a few days. Mr. Stiles even entrusts Eddie with driving his red truck to the dump with a variety of accumulated junk, like old paint brushes and bricks. While at the dump, Eddie spots a perfectly good refrigerator and manages to get it into the truck to take home. He takes a brief detour to his apartment, believing his luck is changing. Running into his apartment, he pauses to drink a glass of water. When he goes back outside, the truck (and the fridge) are gone. He beats up on himself, knowing cars and trucks are stolen frequently in his neighborhood and seeing himself as being a stupid loser: “[y]ou stupid glue rag!” (30). He knows he won’t be working for Mr. Stiles ever again.
Back in his apartment, he hears the click-clickof heels approaching. It is his aunt, the one who wants him to avenge Jesus’s murder. She has been bribing him with tortillas, and in a red towel she presents him with what looks like another tortilla. When Eddie unwraps the towel, he sees a gun, “as large as a plumber’s pipe wrench” (34). Aunt Delores wants him to kill Jesus’s purported murderer. Eddie leaves the apartment, starts jogging down the street, and looks to the east. He ominously sees “one large bruise that was slowly becoming the night” (34).
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
The first two chapters of Buried Onions provide the backdrop for all that follows. Eddie tries to stay on the right road, despite an array of forces working against him, including gang members, Angel, drugs, lack of money, relatives that want him to murder a person, and whites who look down on him. In the first two chapters, Eddie remains steadfast. In the last lines of Chapter Two, we see him meaningfully walking away from his aunt and her insistence that he shoot Jesus’s killer. The sky to the east is dark, foreshadowing that even more trouble lies ahead.
The first chapter contains the first reference of many to buried onions. The chapter also carries the reference to the one big onion in Eddie’s imagination that underlies pretty much everything in Fresno, so far as he is concerned. Its vapors, he believes, are everywhere, permeating sadness and death.
It is in this first chapter that Soto also begins his frequent use of allusions to insects and animals as he begins to establish a deterministic Fresno landscape. Eddie frequently notices red ants and spiders. Eddie himself is not into drugs, but many of those with whom he must associate are, and he notices the spider-like puckers from injections on their skin.
Mr. Stiles represents the white world of success and beckoning comfort that Eddie has begun to see as imperfect. The child on the tricycle who is eager to lie about Eddie represents the hatred that exists in many when they encounter a person who is in some way “other.” The north side of Fresno has its riches but Eddie knows most of them are not for him. Even his friendship with Mr. Stiles, a good man and as good as it gets for someone like Eddie in that affluent but xenophobic world, is on shaky ground.
Soto utilizes images and symbols from American Realist and Naturalist traditions, such as ants, spiders, and animal allusions, to suggest a Darwinian world of survival of the fittest, painting a deterministic canvas of life in south Fresno. Touches that add to the book’s ominous tone include the mortuary students at the college, the tragic irony of having the truck stolen, even when Eddie is shown as being savvy to dangers around him, and the bleak awareness by Eddie that acquaintances such as Angel are basically no good. Eddie is surrounded by strong environmental pressures that seem largely inescapable.
The ebb and flow of hope, a dominant theme of the novel, are typified in the episode with Mr. Stiles. Eddie is shown to go out swinging at life each day, doing so with a responsible, honest heart. However, sooner or later, usually sooner, he seems to be knocked down once again.
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