The Holocaust had revealed unimaginable human evil, and the terrors of the atomic bomb had been imprinted on the human psyche. The Pearl reflects the great disillusionment in humanity Steinbeck felt as a result of the war. Having already been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath, he was a well-established writer by the time he wrote The Pearl, which originally appeared in Womans Home Companion in 1945, at the end of World War II. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1962) and the author of classics such as The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, and Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck wrote extensively about the oppressed, the disenfran-chised, and the destitute. Modern readers can relate to questions raised in The Pearl: Is it better to be satisfied or to aspire to more? What if trying to improve our standard of living means that we can no longer appreciate what we already have? How do ambition and greed change our relationships with others and alter our attitudes and ac-tions? Since ambition is generally accepted as being a positive character trait and achieving prosperity is deemed by most to be a worthy pursuit, The Pearl offers interesting insights that many students may not have considered. The idea negates the desire to reach for the American Dream, a dream that has traditionally linked happiness to prosperity. Steinbecks parable seems to suggest that ambition is inherently evil. Carrying the body of their dead child, he and Juana return to town, where Kino throws the pearl back into the sea. In the novellas dramatic climax, one of the hunters kills Coyotito, destroying all of Kinos hopes and dreams for the future. The family is tracked like animals until they are discovered in the mountains. Eventually, he and his family must leave town in the dark of night. Consumed by greed, he strikes his wife and kills a man. Kino becomes mistrustful, suspicious, and isolated. He announces that he will send his son to school, which will liberate Coyotito from the oppressive yoke of colonialism. When Kino finds a great pearl, he is overjoyed and begins to aspire to a better life. He lives in harmony with the natural world around him, satisfied and at peace. He loves his wife, Juana, and his baby, Coyotito.
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Though the plot is simple, the themes in The Pearl touch on many fundamental as-pects of human nature and human experience ambition, obsession, oppression, greed, reason, instinct, trust, and self-preservation are all addressed in the narrative.Īs the story opens, Kinos simple life fulfills him. John Steinbecks novella, The Pearl, focuses on a single central question: Is there danger in wanting to improve ones lot in life? In this parable, Kino is an impoverished Indian who lives near the town of La Paz, Mexico, on the Gulf of California when he discovers the greatest pearl in the world, his life is irrevocably changed. Instructional Focus - Teaching the Literary Elementsįor it is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more. In the end, what remains of value to Kino and Juana is immaterial and has no price: love and the family.Copyright eNotes 2005-2012 / Cover photo copyright Seanyu |
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Moreover, wealth in the novel is, in fact, not a source of well being, but of bad fortune or malicious greed. What is valuable to one man (the canoe to Kino) may not seem valuable to another. The Pearl reveals the slipperiness of value and evaluation: often, value is assessed by those who are already wealthy and powerful. Unlike the pearl, whose sole function is to be possessed and looked at and whose value is assigned (arbitrarily) by people in power, the canoe is valuable because of its functionality and tradition, and its association with the dignity of work. It seems, therefore, that Kino values things that can help him provide him for his family. Kino’s canoe, on the other hand, is described as the “one thing of value he owned in the world.” Kino prizes his canoe not as a possession but as a “source of food,” a tool that allows him to fish and dive for pearls. As the narrator describes, a pearl forms by a natural “accident”: “a grain of sand could lie in the folds of muscle and irritate the flesh until in self-protection the flesh coated the grain with a layer of smooth cement.” Moreover, the determination of the pearl’s value has little to do with anything inherent to the object itself.
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That the pearl-dealers then so underestimate the price of the pearl reveals how distant the monetary worth of something can be from its perceived value, and how much value is determined by those in power. The value of the pearl, for example, requires reassessment throughout the novel: at the moment of its discovery, it seems to be worth Coyotito’s life. The value and evaluation of material entities is a central theme in The Pearl.