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 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Eddie is released after a few hours of questioning by the police. He again notices more crucifixes on people, this time on a blind man selling Snicker bars who is holding an axe hidden behind his back. Eddie notes, “Christ and a club!” (105). Mr. Stiles’ truck has been used in a laundromat theft where an elderly man was killed, and it is Eddie’s calling in the location of the truck to Mr. Stiles that has resulted in Eddie becoming a suspect in the murder.
Eddie heads to the hospital, to visit Jose. When he gets there, he learns Jose has been released to his family. Back at his apartment, a note from Mr. Stiles confirms that he was the one to call the police and connect Eddie to his stolen truck. Mr. Stiles justifies this action by writing that he “had to be sure you were not involved in the assault” (108). Eddie wants to cry, saying his “soul [had been] trampled by bad luck and bad luck’s brother, hard times” (108).
Mr. Stiles leaves Eddie’s bicycle and a six-pack of sodas for Eddie, in a seeming apology. Eddie remains in his apartment for two days, watching television and eating. He does battle with the cockroaches which have been propagating in his absence. A knock at the door shows how Eddie’s thinking is becoming patterned towards fear: he immediately assumes it is Angel. Instead, it is Coach and Jose. Coach wants the three of them to go fishing together in the country.
At the river, Eddie confesses he is afraid of animals unless in a group; he thinks that in a group he would be the last eaten, since he is thin. He won’t go skinny dipping because he is ashamed of his body and deems his genitalia small. Eddie can’t swim well; he nearly drifts away, downstream, while floating. Appreciating all Coach has done for him, he imagines he is returning to college next fall and talks in detail about his air conditioning knowledge. Coach tells him to be quiet. The trio discuss scary movies and rock stars while they fish. As the afternoon ends, Coach takes them to a drive-in for chocolate milk— “that beautiful childhood liquid” (120).
The chapter closes with a macabre pastoral image from the drive home: “In the dusk…cows chewed their grass and the flies chewed their cows” (120).
Chapter 8 Summary
Chapter 8 opens with Eddie thinking he hears someone call his name in the night while he rests in bed: “[h]ey, Eddie” (121). Eddie wonders if he is going crazy while he concentrates on listening to sounds from the neighborhood. Hearing the voice while in his own bed fuels his fears of Angel. Eddie fears an impending confrontation.
The next morning, the money Eddie’s mother had promised to send him arrives, but it’s not enough for him to get Merced. Instead of a bus ticket he spends the money on food. On his apartment building’s front steps, he is accosted by a woman named Belinda, who seems to be interested in him even though she is married to a man named Junior. While making excuses to get out of the conversation, Eddie spots Angel down the street and flees. In an alley, Eddie encounters a child, who gives him an apricot: “I didn’t have time for this future social worker” (125). He ends up near Holmes School, but this time opts not to go see Coach. Eddie explains that he has “an appointment to mess [Angel] up before he got me, a sort of Golden Rule for homies” (126). He passes a liquor store, a used car lot, and a radiator shop, before arriving at an A&W en route to scout Angel’s block.
At the A&W, he talks to a girl he knows, who’s a waitress there. The two flirt, but Eddie is too distracted by Angel to fully engage.
After lunch, Eddie goes to Angel’s neighborhood. Soto provides description of a Mexican garden; Eddie has a run-in with Angel’s dog, throwing a trowel and a baseball mitt at the animal to get him barking, then finally a flower pot, all to draw out Angel. Angel comes outside, at first not seeing Eddie, who is hiding behind a bush. Eddie grabs his legs so that he falls backwards, hitting his head. Eddie screams at him about killing Jesus. The two fight. Samuel appears and starts swinging a stick at Eddie. Eddie puts Samuel in a headlock and rams the boy’s head into a wall. In the interim, Angel disappears, and Eddie fears he may reappear with a gun. Fearing for his life, Eddie flees the scene.
Bleeding but not seriously injured, Eddie retreats to Jose’s mom’s house, and borrows a clean shirt from Jose. Jose’s mother says Eddie brings bad luck. Jose and Eddie go to the hospital to get Jose’s stitches taken out. Eddie doesn’t like the place, especially with “more people going in than leaving” (138). Whether “by God’s choice or the devil’s” (138), Eddie again encounters Angel, who has come to the hospital to have a cut above his eye stitched. The two glare at each other, then Eddie pounces on Angel. They roll down the stairs as they fight, hospital personnel, patients, and visitors scattering to get out of their way.
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
Eddie’s confrontation with the cockroaches, in Chapter 7, serves as microcosm for the myriad other conflicts he has recently encountered. That Eddie believes a second wave of the bugs to be, literally, the same roaches he’s just killed illustrates Eddie’s inability to discern one problem from another; conflicts increasingly arrive without significant differentiation, and an underlying nihilism to Eddie’s worldview grows. That multiple, potential love interests are named Norma further reinforces the notion that Eddie’s options for a future in Fresno will all arrive at the same place. His arrest and subsequent release by the police, in regard to the murder at the laundromat, provides social commentary for society’s inability to solve its own problems—the actual murderer is never caught, and the police are all but too happy to believe Mr. Stiles’ allegations towards Eddie, a fact that functions as emblem for inherent, systemic societal racism and xenophobia. The subtext of Eddie’s comment that he is afraid of animals unless in a group is further social commentary: if the individual cannot be categorized and bureaucratized, and does not categorize and bureaucratize themselves, they can only wind up as prey.
If Eddie’s apartment is the only setting in which he is afforded the privileges of individualism and privatization, these moments explode those notions—Eddie can no longer hide from his own life. This inability to effectively privatize is further affirmed by the trip to the river, where Eddie, literally out in the open, is able to confess insecurities and have his lies called out by Coach: Eddie is indeed not going back to college, and has no real plan forward. If his apartment has functioned as metaphorical womb, his float on the river is the birthing process—Eddie must accept himself as responsible for being in the world. Immediately following this realization is the image of the cows being “eaten” by flies: the natural world, of which human society is necessarily part of, is inherently parasitic.
Eddie’s return to Fresno, in Chapter 8, is replete with confusion and chaos: running images appear with increased frequency, and the possibility of an affair with a married woman symbolizes the erosion of traditional societal values. Alleys and backyards sum to a maze of confusion. Eddie’s fight with Angel and Samuel is the only way for Eddie to stem the fear and the running, and accept he is part of the word.
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