But the promise of wealth manifests the archetypal evil hidden in the community's unconscious, like the pearl that had lain hidden in its oyster at the bottom of the sea. 19), the pearl that Kino finds lights the way to a more just world and the end of centuries of mistreatment by white colonizers. 'In this gulf of uncertain light there were more illusions than realities' (p. We first meet him in the dimness before dawn, listening to the sounds of his wife, Juana, at her chores, which merge in his mind with the ancestral Song of the Family. The poor fisherman Kino in The Pearl dreams of education for his son and salvation for his people. So we have the paradox of the author apparently denouncing injustice while also exalting acceptance of the sorrows visited on humanity, whether those sorrows are wrought by nature or by humans themselves.Īll three books examine the morality and necessity of actions the characters choose as they pursue their dreams. In these works that span the grim decade from 1937 to 1947, Steinbeck urges the dispossessed to challenge a system that denies them both sustenance and dignity, and to seek the spiritual belonging that enables individuals to achieve their full humanity. But in this epic novel, as well as in Of Mice and Men and The Pearl, Steinbeck seems to question whether the mysteries of human existence can ever be fully explained. 'Men is supposed to think things out,' insists Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. While evidence for different political and philosophical stances may be culled from Steinbeck's writings, a reader who stops at this point misses some of the most interesting aspects of his work, including his use of paradox. He has been characterized variously as an advocate of socialist-style solutions to the depredations of capitalism, a champion of individualism, a dabbler in sociobiology, and a naturalist. When John Steinbeck accepted his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, he described the writer's obligation as 'dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.' For some critics, that purpose has obscured Steinbeck's literary value.

The pearl john steinbeck audio