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Does Steinbeck assign any positive value to Cannery Row life?
Why does Doc choose biology as his profession, and what is the thematic significance of his decision?
In such a comparatively short novel, why is so much space given to the repair of the car? Does the car have any symbolic significance?
Explain Doc's peculiar response to finding the dead girl in the water, and explain how his reaction is integral to his character.
Identify the most significant symbol in the novel and justify your choice.
State one possible theme of the novel, and support your position.
Give your opinion on why Cannery Row is considered an important novel in the canon of world literature, and why it was seminal in the nomination of Steinbeck as a Nobel Prize winner.
Appraise a significant conflict in the novel, and judge its thematic importance.
Instructor's Recommendation: I would like to see an essay on Steinbeck's use of characterization in this novel. What type of people are in this novel? How does Steinbeck draw these characters? Through dialogue? Appearances? Actions? Beliefs? What kind of world has these types of inhabitants, and what is Steinbeck saying about it?
Historical Themes
Steinbeck And The Nineteen-Thirties
The fact that John Steinbeck rose to literary prominence during a period
of acute economic and political crisis has tended to obscure both the
direction and the value of his work. If World War I had been a shaping
influence (although not the only influence) on such writers as Hemingway, Dos
Passos, and Faulkner, one might say that the Great Depression had something of
the same effect on the development of Steinbeck as a literary artist. Unlike
the World War I group, however, for whom the shattering of traditional values
came with sudden and enormous impact, Steinbeck-like other writers of the
thirties-inherited rather than experienced a cultural disenchantment. Quite
aside from the development of his "nonteleological philosophy," in other words
(the objective analysis of social and political "organisms"), Steinbeck, from
the very beginning of his career, regarded all "causes" and all solutions,
with both detachment and skepticism.
During the thirties, this detachment troubled many of Steinbeck's
reviewers. For the attitude of literary persons, like that of other
intellectuals, had shifted from political alienation (a revulsion against all
political rhetoric) to political commitment; this was, after all, the era of
the "proletarian novel" - a time when American fiction, as perhaps never
before, concerned itself with the broad-scope economic problems, with
political argument, with discussions of the basic fabric of Capitalism itself.
Such discussions, furthermore, were often keyed to fixed dogmas, especially
that of Marxism.
The fact that Steinbeck was indeed fascinated with the human drama of the
dispossessed - those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder-seemed to
define him as a brilliant new voice in the chorus of "working-class" writers.
Steinbeck, however, as we have already indicated, refused to take part in any
chorus, especially that of politics, and as a result his work was often
misunderstood even as it became enormously popular. For Steinbeck approached
the economic struggles of his time not as a partisan but as a dramatist; he
viewed the struggle itself as a subject to be used rather than as a cause to
be embraced.
Man As Moral Organism
That Steinbeck is "inconsistent" even in his use of biological metaphor
is emphasized by some critics as a serious flaw in his work; certainly it is
clear that in his later books the writer moves away from the "ecology" of
group-man to an examination of individual moral confrontations. Steinbeck's
preoccupation with archetypes, however, is very much in evidence even with
such a book as The Winter of Our Discontent; for Ethan, Mr. Baker, Ellen,
Marullo, and others are themselves protagonists in an ancestral drama-a drama
not set in New England alone, but in the moral universe of man. That man's
universe is, precisely, a moral universe is what sets him apart from the rest
of nature. Granting that man is but one "organism" among many, he is also a
moral organism, and this is a vital difference indeed. Steinbeck's insistence
that moral choice is man's proper "environment" is an element in his work
which sets it apart both from the books produced by the Naturalist movement
around the turn of the century and from the novels produced by the
Marxist-orientated "proletarian" writers of the 1930s.
Moral Criticism
The critic Malcolm Cowley described Cannery Row as a "poisoned cream
puff," and the fact that John Steinbeck agreed with him should give pause to
any reader who sees the book simply as a literary confection. "Poison,"
however, seems a rather strong word for a book which is certainly no more
shocking to reader peace-of-mind than are other Steinbeck works. Perhaps
Cowley was warning that readers often react strongly to Cannery Row because
they are not quite prepared to find Steinbeck the moralist so stubbornly
implanted in Steinbeck the reconteur, storyteller, or genial (and apparently
pagan) philosopher.
For Cannery Row is a serious book, although one which will indeed be
"poison" only for those who regard respectability as a definition of
morality. That Steinbeck does not do so is obvious enough; it is Doc, after
all, the marine-biologist and spokesman for the author himself, who canonizes
the boys of the Palace Flophouse as both the "Virtues" and "Graces." If
Steinbeck refuses to equate respectability with humanity and truth, however,
he also refuses to sentimentalize the disreputable - and in this, as always,
he is the consummate artist.
Human Action Vs Human Intent
For the characters in Cannery Row may be more than they appear to be-more
than obscure storekeepers or drifters-but they, like the humanity which they
represent, are far less than perfect. Neither their happiness nor their means
of achieving it is simply the "good" way compared to the "bad" way of the rest
of the money-grubbing world. Mack and the boys, like the rest of us, often
break when they wish to build, hurt when they want to love; and, like the rest
of us, their immediate appetites often distract them from their deeper need to
give of themselves.
The people of Cannery Row, representing humanity, are "consistent only in
their inconsistency" - in short, they contain the admixture of good and evil
which renders self-righteous human judgment both irrelevant and absurd. Lee
Chong, for example, the Chinese grocer, is-as Steinbeck himself tells us-
"more" than a Chinese grocer. He must be. Perhaps he is evil balanced and held
suspended by good - an Asiatic planet held to its orbit by the pull of Lao Tze
and held away from Lao Tze by the centrifugality of abacus and cash
register-Lee Chong suspended, spinning, whirling among groceries and ghosts."
And what is true of Lee Chong is true of Cannery Row: a community of
human souls often erring, often fumbling, often absurd, but somehow noble and
touching even in the fact of their own lack of "importance." For given the
vast forces at work in the chaos which is life - and death - human effort is
both fragile and ludicrous, and this is precisely what creates the tragedy,
the pride, the humility, the sadness, the comedy, and the nobility of our
mortal condition.
Order Vs Chaos
The theme of Cannery Row, in short, is no less than a poetic statement of
human order surrounded by a chaotic and essentially indifferent universe, and
this is one reason why the structure of the book does seem so "loose" - why
Steinbeckian digressions and interchapters so often interrupt the flow of
narrative.
A wandering and mysterious Oriental threads his way through the story
with no "purpose" but to remind us of the emptiness and pathos and loneliness
we all share, things which render our cruelty or ambition futile. The face of
a drowned girl appears like a paradoxical vision of "immortal death"; a chaos
of sea-life-and-feeding is given order and shape by an obscure scientist -
observer, who realizes the he is himself part of the processes which he
catalogues; a serio-comic painter devotes himself to work which inevitably
comes to nothing - and we recognize an allegory of our own labors; there is
suicide, loneliness, joy, love, and isolation jumbled together in a peculiar
and haphazard fashion which somehow results in emotion neither peculiar nor
haphazard; the recognition of ourselves.
The symbolism of chaos-and-order is basic to Cannery Row; various
characters, each in his own fashion, try to arrange and observe what cannot,
in any essential aspect, be changed. As Steinbeck says in one of his
"inter-chapters" or digressions, it is the function of The World-of human
communication-to create by means of faith and art an Order of love which is
mankind's only answer to that fate which all men, and indeed all life, must
ultimately share. And if John Steinbeck turns to the "outcasts" from society
as symbols for this vision, it may be that only the outcasts of machine
civilization can still remember who they truly are.
Once again, even in this most charming of books, Steinbeck
recapitulates the themes so integral to his work: the need of the human animal
to organize, to combine for purposes beyond that of the mere individual
appetite; the corruption and poison of moral pomposity and insane acquisition;
and the loneliness-within-brotherhood of all flesh and mortality.
The "Failure" As Hero
It is Doc, in Cannery Row, who provides the objective and nonteleological
point of view which is to be found in so many of Steinbeck's works. For Doc,
himself freed from the get-get-get philosophy of the world of the machine by
virtue of his science, his detachment, his gentleness, and his personal
refusal to be pushed into either Social Importance or the role of Social
Judge, insists that the boys of the Palace Flophouse are universal symbols
rather than mere ne'er-do-wells. And what they symbolize is simply this: the
madness of a world in which those who enjoy life most are those whom the world
considers "failures." For Mack and the boys most certainly are failures-in
everything but humanity and life itself:
Mack and the boys . . . are the Virtues, the Graces, the Beauties
of the hurried mangled craziness of Monterey and the cosmic
Monterey where men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs
in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for
love destroy everything lovable about them . . . In the world
ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged
by blind jackals, Mac and the boys dine delicately with the tigers,
fondle the frantic heifers, and wrap up the crumbs to feed the
sea-gulls of Cannery Row. What can it profit a man to gain the
whole world and come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a
blown prostate, and bifocals? Mack and the boys avoid the trap,
step over the poison. . . .
I think they survive in this particular world better than other
people. In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with
ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed.
All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs,
and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and
curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy
their appetites without calling them something else.
And the final paradox of all, Doc continues (a paradox which bemuses
Ethan Hawley in The Winter of Our Discontent), is the fact that virtues like
honesty, spontaneity, and kindness are - in the world of the machine - almost
always associated with "failure," while the traits of "success" include greed,
sharpness, suspicion, hypocrisy, envy, disaffection, and general meanness -
what Dostoevsky called "the toothache of the soul." It is this paradox which
Steinbeck examines lightly, lovingly, and sardonically; after all, where both
human freedom and human virtue are obsolete, the result is itself an
absurdity. The result of this examination, of course, is a "lightness" which
contains a total bitterness - the bitterness not of a "revolutionary," but of
a moralist.
Even in this short novel, every passerby and remotely mentioned person
has a name; and certainly there is no use in listing them. It is curious to
note that though every one of the characters used in this novel is nothing
more than a stereotype, the place itself, Cannery Row, is made to live with an
exciting, rare, and desirable sense of honesty.
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