Lucky Boy Plot and Elements

Parallel Plots / Elements

1. How do two plots work together to enhance the larger arc?

Sekaran expertly highlighted the the “silencing” of the illegal immigrant’s experience by departing from the story of Soli in jail to focus on Kavya and Rishi’s adoption of Iggy

Time moved linearly, though obviously not always at the same speed. Months passed for Soli in prison while we got minute by minute, second by second updates on Iggy’s adoption experience. However, time never jumped, so I felt a momentum surging through the novel because of time marching in a forward fashion. Time was an anchor I tracked, because the characters did. Read: Soli’s and Sylvia’s It was Wednesday or “Today is Friday.”

Multiple protagonist perspectives were allowed by the close-third narrative style. I did feel a heavier emphasis on Kavya’s character’s thoughts, but that’s not to say I wasn’t in Rishi’s head as well. I think it’s just that we spent more time with Kavya. On this note, I really enjoyed that Sekaran chose not to put the reader in a close-third reading experience with the Cassidy’s. I didn’t care what the hell they were thinking.

2. Light and Wind - Elemental Influences

I toyed with the idea of making a table in this blog post, and decided to spare everyone because it wouldn’t really prove much beyond this: there are more than 30 references to sunlight, sunshine, dusk, warmth of the sun, daylight, shadows spilling, darkness. In tracking them with too many little sticky notes, I started to realize the sun was an element Sekaran used to touch “big” emotions -- joy, new awareness, discovery. The absence of sun was equally important -- think of when Soli was locked in the closet in prison, waiting to use the phone, and she could barely see her hands in front of her. The lack of light was the reader’s visual cue for devastation.

Wind was another force that pricked my ears as I read. I noticed that wind was used in the very beginning when Kavya had to roll the windows down, and Rishi was depicted as distant, cold, and unconcerned with the lack of AC in the car. Wind, in that moment, was a force that was unwelcome and seemed to indicate a rift between the two characters. However, wind was also associated with Checo, who came quickly into Soli’s life and vanished: “Checo was no more a father than the wind was. He’d blown through her, woken her up one day and kept herbreathing. And then, as quick as the wind, he was gone” (96).

Wind was also a nasty, cruel force when Soli was in prison and cold out on the yard. “Only the wind blew, a rough and dirty wind, a monstrous and foreign wind. It whistled through the yard and up Soli’s shirt, ran its old-man fingers around her nipples and down her back” (341).

The elements were so important in this novel that I knew it must mean something when both wind and light came together. It first happened on the bottom of p. 407, after this good man, Elmer, gave Soli a rosary. Soli walked out into the sun and felt a wind that blew the hair off of her shoulders. This was a moment where she has hope, real hope, of getting to Berkeley to find her son.

Also, the novel ends with wind and light converging. On the last page:

“Will the sun hide its brazen face and leave [Soli and Ignacio] be?” and “This is the story of the sun and the wind and the child they bore. This is the story of the sun and the wind, dragged aground by the meddlesome earth.”

Ignacio El Viento - wind in Spanish

Soli - sun in Latin