The Hero in John Steinbecks Cannery Row :: Cannery Row Essays

The hardship As Hero in Cannery Row    It is mendelevium, in Cannery Row, who provides the objective and nonteleological menstruum of view which is to be found in so many of Steinbecks works. For Doc, himself freed from the get-get-get philosophical system of the world of the machine by virtue of his science, his detachment, his gentleness, and his personal refusal to be pushed into any Social Importance or the role of Social Judge, insists that the boys of the Palace flophouse argon universal symbols rather than mere neer-do-wells. And what they symbolize is simply this the craziness of a world in which those who enjoy life most argon those whom the world considers failures. For Mack and the boys most certainly atomic number 18 failures-in everything but kind-heartedness 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 the ir stomachs in the stir to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable or so 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 vagabond up the crumbs to feed the sea-gulls of Cannery Row. What gage it profit a man to develop 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 animadvert 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 boastful 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 e lse.   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