Dagoberto Gilb Analysis

In Dagoberto Gilb stories, “Love in L.A.”, “Shout”, and “Uncle Rock”, Gilb portrays different types of people who are all a part of the working class. In each of the stories Gilb sheds an inside look on the lives of working people and the hardships that come with be a working person, from struggling to find a constant job, and how a family household is affected. The themes from Gilb’s stories are slightly different but all are common through the struggles a working person has to endure. Gilb in “Love in L.A.” does not portray a person who is a working person but someone who doesn’t have a steady job. Jake, the main character in the story is stuck in traffic and daydreams about all the things he could have with a steady job but knows that
Gilb said, “Jake was thinking about his freedom so much that when he glimpsed its green light he just went ahead and stared bye bye to the steadily employed” (Meyer 430). In this case Jake chooses a rough life with freedom instead of a job and the new car he day dreams about. This shows Jake may want a job to provide things he wants but doesn’t want to give up his freedom. Gilb uses Jake to symbolize a person who knows there is a better life out there and knows he has to work to get it. Yet for whatever reason Jake and some people choose or simply can’t get a stable job.
The portrayals of a working people’s life doesn’t get any clearer then the actions taking place in Gilb’s story “Shout”. In the story “Shout” Gilb explains how a regular day is for a man coming home from a hard day at work. Coming home from work from the extreme heat outside, it makes everything irritating to the man. The man in the story was upset because the door was simply
In “Uncle Rock”, Erick has to deal with his mother not having a constant job and men trying to date her. The portrayal Gilb tries to show is the difficulty a single parent has on supporting their children and the willingness to do things to better both of their lives. Gilb gives us an inside look at the mother’s past life, “…she’d had to share a room with her brothers and sisters. They didn’t have toilets. They didn’t have electricity. Sometimes they didn’t have enough food” (Meyer 439). As readers we see the mom allowing men to enter her and her son’s life and think why is she allowing that. From Gilb telling us about her past life, it makes more sense why she is talking to different men. It is so she can give Erick a better life. As people we judge based on what we see and not what we know. Gilb portrayal in the story is that some working people do things that may not seem right but force themselves to do it because specific reasons to better themselves or someone else. Some may or may not understand the difficult struggles people face when they are young and its because those struggles that working people do the things they do, to improve their