struggle for existence incidents in the pearl john steinbeck

Tularecito, for example, is all instinct. Though some of the characters are spiritual kin to the “grotesques of Anderson’s famous collection,” they are markedly different in their attempts to reconcile their romantic intuition with the reality of social convention. The land is beautiful, fruitful, prosperous but the people of the land are thwarted by the serpent of human frailty. Put in another way, the stories form a latter-day Garden of Eden myth. The theme of this collection of short stories is the conflict inherent in the tension between the characters’ desire to live in the peaceful valley and their own human weaknesses, which prevent them from fulfilling their desires. The Munroe farm, for example, is cursed, and the curse executes itself on all the characters who come into contact with the Munroes.

Yet for all the outward tranquillity, the valley cannot remain isolated from the real world of economic hardship and violence. Secluded like some medieval bower or enchanted castle, the place evokes images of romance and peace. Using the frame narrative of Winesburg as a model, The Pastures of Heaven deals with the lives of a number of characters living in the peaceful, idyllic valley in the hills beyond Monterey. Structurally the book shows the influence of Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, a series of short stories, each independent but each connected by the locale and the theme of psychic isolation. Nowhere is this duality-the tension between realism and romance-more evident than in Steinbeck’s earliest short stories, those forming his first major work, The Pastures of Heaven. Even in a late novel such as East of Eden, his best books behind him, Steinbeck symbolically construed this duality in the reference to the two mountain ranges that defined the territory of his narrator’s childhood, the “sunny” flowered slopes of the Gabilans to the east and the dark, brooding peaks of the Santa Lucias to the west. The best of Steinbeck’s work maintains this tension- developed by a narrative tone-between the world of harsh reality and the world of animal-like freedom. His characters become not so much victims of social or economic failure but celebrants of a life-force beyond society and economics.

His characteristic narrative method is to portray these people with an unerring mixture of realism and romance.Īlthough the Great Depression is the central social focus of Steinbeck’s best work, his characters respond to those social forces not only in terms of realistic confrontation but also in the form of a romantic, intuitive escape. His fiction is peopled with men and women somehow shoaled from society’s mainstream yet possessed of a vision that is itself a source of strength. The qualities that most characterize the work of John Steinbeck ( Febru– December 20, 1968) are a supple narrative style, a versatility of subject matter, and an almost mystical sympathy for the common human being.

Struggle for existence incidents in the pearl john steinbeck