Gary Soto’s Saturday at the Canal and How Things Work each feature a different perspective on a surprisingly related theme. Similarly, the tones of the poems are similar, while their syntactic structures are very different. The former poem features a pessimistic and wishful point of view, one in which dreams are, for the moment, out of grasp. The latter poem is very neutral, simplistic, and expresses a strong deterministic point of view. The two poems seem to converge on the fact that life is much more out of our control that we like to think. Meanwhile, the former poem exhibits longer sentences structures and more vivid use of verbs, describing the narrator’s ambitious dreams, and the latter poem demonstrates terse sentences, describing everyday occurrences, almost from an existentialist perspective.

Saturday at the Canal describes briefly the perspective of a young individual who seeks to get out a small town in the hopes of making it to San Francisco. The perspective is a bit gloomy, assuming that this is an impossibility and that life in the small town is, to say the least, boring. This perspective seems to communicate to the reader a relatable position, that dreams are sometimes unrealistic, especially so early on in life and when one lacks the ambition to accomplish them. It is almost inspiration in that no one wants to be in the narrator’s shoes. On the other hand, the perspective of the narrator is one that takes for granted the things going on around the narrator. The narrator is spending time with a friend and instead of enjoying the friend’s company is daydreaming about San Francisco and lamenting about not being able to be there. Additionally, the narrator seems to believe that the people in San Francisco are so much better than those in the narrator’s small town and that people in San Francisco can relate much better to the narrator and his friend. This is an example of a cliché ‘the grass is always greener’ perspective, implicitly hinting that one should appreciate what one has. Nevertheless, either interpretation suggests that the narrator believes that getting to San Francisco is beyond the narrator’s control.

How Things Work features a similar perspective. The narrator in this poem describes certain inevitabilities in the quotidian features of life. For example, Soto writes, “Like rain,” describing the ways in which tip money goes to pay for the waitress’s child, and then, “If we buy a goldfish, someone tries on a hat. If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom,” describing the sort of trivial and deterministic proceedings of everyday life. In this regard, both poems are quite similar. The narrators of both poems each exhibit a deterministic perspective on life. In How Things Work, the narrator takes a neutral attitude towards the deterministic flow of life, while in Saturday at the Canal the narrator takes a negative attitude towards the deterministic flow, not of everyday life, but the narrator’s life in particular. It has not gone the way that the narrator had intended, regardless of how young the narrator truly is. Thus, the deterministic perspective of each poem is unique. One deals with everyday occurrences, while the other deals with the specific trajectory of one’s life. Still, each takes a deterministic perspective.

The writing style employed by Soto is quite different for each poem. In Saturday at the Canal, the sentences are long with many dependent clauses throughout. The narrator describes, rather articulately for living in the world that the narrator lives in, his mundane life and the unfulfilled dreams that seem to no longer drive the narrator. Meanwhile, How Things Work features short, terse sentences that are to the point, with events being described in brief spurts. The narrator takes the reader through a very, very simplified version of a typical day, almost appearing to be lost in an epistemic crisis, only to regain footing in the last line with, “And things just keep going. I guess.” The writing styles employed in each poem reflect the attitudes of each poem. In Saturday at the Canal, Soto writes much more elegantly than one might expect from the narrator. This may reflect the narrator’s snobby attitude towards his hometown and his penchant for the more complicated life in San Francisco. Likewise, in How Things Work, Soto writes tersely, perhaps to reflect the rather dull, everyday aspects of life that the narrator describes. Each writing style employed, then, can be viewed as an extension of the narrator’s perspective. Word choice, too, is indicative of each narrator’s description, with Saturday at the Canal exhibiting much more vivid descriptions, reflecting the once ambitious dreams of the narrator, and How Things Work remaining simplistic, reflecting the everyday occurrences described.

The greatest similarity between these two poems is their deterministic perspectives. While each poem features a different attitude on the deterministic aspects of life, the narrator of each poem seems to believe that there are certain aspects of life that are out of one’s control. The difference, however, is what these aspects of life are. In Saturday at the Canal, these aspects have to do with the narrator’s life, specifically, and how his dreams have, thus far, been unfulfilled. On the other hand, in How Things Work, these aspects concerns everyday occurrences such as tipping a waitress and shopping. The attitudes of the two narrators are also very different, with one being pessimistic and one taking a neutral stance on the aspects of life out of one’s control. Similarly, the writing styles employed in the two poems strongly reflect the perspectives of each of the poems. While the two works seem very different from one another, they converge in a similar deterministic perspective of life.