Exploring the minds of six year olds can be a very interesting experience. Gary Soto tells this story as a young boy at a time when he seems young and foolish. Soto does a great job showing the contrast between good and evil through the eyes of a child. He successfully conveys the boy's guilt through his use of imagery, repetition, and contrast. He uses these tools to bring the reader into the boy's mind so they can explore his guilt and thoughts. He first leads the reader to understand what he is thinking using images. He begins with a darker point, “my sweet tooth glinting and the guilt juice wetting my armpits.” This shows that he had already committed the crime in his mind before actually carrying it out. When he sits down to eat his pie, he gives the image of a beautiful summer day, thinking: "The sun flickered between the branches of a yellowish sycamore." He shows that he is happy to finally be able to eat the pie he stole. He showed his guilt when he said, “I wiped my sticky fingers on the grass and rolled my tongue over the corners of my mouth. » This is an allusion to the popular expression "There is blood on your hands", which means that you are guilty of something. He also shows his guilt by thinking: “A squirrel has nailed itself high on the trunk, where it has divided into two large limbs covered with crusts of bark. » This is a biblical allusion to the cross on which Jesus was crucified. These images help to relay his feelings of guilt. One of the major contrasts in the passage is Soto's greed versus politeness. This is best illustrated when his neighbor, cross-eyed Johnny, politely asks for a piece of pie and Soto rudely pushes him away. Then cross-eyed Johnny tells him “Your hands...... middle of paper ...... It's when Soto is sitting on his lawn after eating the pie, and he looks around. "A car honked and the driver knew. Mrs. Hancock was standing on her lawn, hands on her hip, and she knew. My mother, peeling a mountain of potatoes at the Redi-Spud factory , knew.” The repetition of knew shows how paranoid Soto is about people finding out he stole the cake. Paranoia almost always appears in people when they feel guilty about having done something. This also shows that Soto is not very good at hiding the guilt he feels. Soto feels terribly guilty about stealing the pie from the store. He shows it in different ways. There are many rhetorical devices in the passage, and they are used to show the guilt he had when he stole that pie. Imagery, contrasts and repetition were among the main subjects in which he expressed his guilt and sin..