Common Theme Essay

Josh Pinneo
Mr. Gowans
Language Arts 12
10/16/12

Common Theme Essay

In this paper I will be covering the common theme of these three stories: Chango, What You Pawn I Will Redeem, Silver Pavements Golden Roofs. In the story Chango, Bony finds a dead monkey head in his parents front yard and decides to keep it. Bony is kind of a drunk, can’t hold a job and still lives with his parents. In the story What You Pawn I Will Redeem, Jackson finds his grandmother’s stolen regalia in a pawn shop and somehow has to come up with nine hundred and ninety nine dollars to buy it back. Unfortunately for him he seems to spend almost every dollar he earns on something (most of the time its alcohol). In the story Silver Pavements Golden Roofs,Jayanti comes to America to live with her aunt and uncle and finds that America is not what she thought it would be. Jayanti finds herself living in a run down apartment and with her drunk of an uncle and her aunt that can’t seem to help herself. In all of these stories you see that there is at least one person using alcohol to solve their problems. In Chango it’s the main character Bony, in What You Pawn I Will Redeem it’s the main character Jackson, and in Silver Pavements Golden Roofs, it’s the uncle to the main character, Bikram.

In the story Chango, there are many instances where this is shown.

“Now Bony made his money installing car stereos on the side. People paid him what they could- twenty or thirty dollars was the usual- but if he knew them, he might let them slide with a case of Corona or Negra Modelo.” (47). He can not hold down a job and will work for beer given the chance.

“‘No’ his father said. ‘All you want to do is drink beer with your new best friend your compadre, instead of going out to make a living.’” (43). His father is saying that he is just wasting his life away, using the monkey’s head and the beer to find comfort, but instead all it is doing for him is making him lazy. He lost his best friend in a car crash and has been a waste since. He drinks everyday, doesn’t work, and now he keeps a dead monkey’s head with him to remind himself of his friend.

In the story What You Pawn I Will Redeem, Jackson is a homeless drunk that finds his way to a pawnshop with his two homeless friends, where he finds his grandmother’s regalia, but they won’t just give him the regalia, he tells him that he needs to come up with nine hundred and ninety nine dollars before the next day and he’ll sell it to him. The pawnshop owner is nice enough to give him twenty dollars to start out with. First thing he does with the money is, he went to the store and bought three bottles of alcohol.

“Rose of Sharon, Junior, and I carried our twenty-dollar bill and our five dollars in loose change over to the 7-Eleven and spent it to buy three bottles of imagination.” (442). He and his friends, given the fortune of twenty dollars and the five dollars they already had, went straight to a store and bought alcohol to help them to think of some way they could come up with the money, instead of putting it towards the regalia like they should have done.

In What You Pawn I Will Redeem, there are many examples that support my thesis but one of the more prominent ones is, the time Jackson goes to the bar with the money he won from the lottery ticket, and buys the entire bar-full of people a few rounds.

“I walked inside Big Heart’s and counted fifteen Indians, eight men and seven women. I didn’t know any of them, but Indians like to belong, so we all pretended to be cousins.

‘How much for whiskey shots?’ I asked the bartender, a fat white guy. ‘You want the bad stuff or the badder stuff?’

‘As bad as you got.’

‘One dollar a shot.’ I laid my eighty dollars on the bar top.” (448). Again he uses his newfound fortune to buy more alcohol. He doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that he is using all his money on alcohol and justifies himself to the cop that finds him on the railroad tracks afterwards, by saying that he’s been killing himself ever since his grandmother died. He uses the alcohol to try to forget about the fact that his grandmother is dead.

In the story Silver Pavements Golden Roofs, Jayanti comes to America to live with her aunt and uncle, what she doesn’t expect is that she would live in a rundown apartment in a bad neighborhood, with her drunk of an uncle.

“He stands in the kitchen doorway, drinking from a can which glints in his fist... Budweiser, I read as he sets the can down, and am shocked to realize he’s drinking beer.” (43). Her uncle drinks beer, which, to her, is something that is unheard of in her family. Just the thought of him drinking brings back memories of the drunks in her Grandfather’s village, the farmhands would lay in the ditches, drunk on palm-toddy.

As you can see in all three stories there is a common occurrence, the act of using alcohol to either solve or try to solve a problem in the characters’ lives. There is a difference in the way they perceive the alcohol will do and what it actually does to their lives. For instance, in What You Pawn I Will Redeem, Jackson uses alcohol to make him feel better for the moment but in time he came to notice that it was only harming him. So in conclusion, there are many ways that the alcohol harmed them in the process but in the moment the characters used it to solve or to try to solve their problems.