The Pearl Read Free Page B

his family, Kino endangers his own morality. The explorations of his namesake in the Baja wilderness are tame compared with Kino’s exploration of the levels of human sin. In the shifting value of the pearl—from great material worth into an objectification of sheer evil—Steinbeck leads the reader to see that its eventual loss will be a necessity.
    Again, by focusing on the family dynamic, Steinbeck adds both life and complexity to his narrative. Kino is not an individual Everyman; he is husband and father as well as man. In fact, being parents complicates all decision making for both Kino and Juana: Kino justifies his wanting the money from the pearl to better his son’s life; his is no selfish desire. Relinquishing the jewel consequently becomes almost impossible, for to give up the money the pearl will bring means relegating Coyotito to the kind of life he and his family have always known. But in a cyclic way, with so much hope invested in Coyotito, his vulnerability frightens both his parents. Juana insists that the doctor see him; Kino, at the farthest edge of his imagining—with the idea that his son could receive an education—begins to understand personal fear. His premonition of wrongdoing, that he has taken on something much larger than he can control, starts with that hopeful idea.
    Kino’s older brother, Juan Tomás, is another important addition to Steinbeck’s reworking of the original legend. The reactions of Juan Tomás support Kino’s almost inarticulate recognition of what is happening to him, giving the reader a way to verify that Kino’s understanding is accurate. Because Steinbeck’s setting for
The Pearl
is almost dreamlike, and certainly unspecific as to geographic location, to provide this confirming voice is necessary: This is a community, a set of people, a family; and yet for all the strength of their unity, they cannot stave off the evil that haunts Kino once he possesses the pearl. Juan Tomás as the older brother has a wider understanding: He knows that Kino has been cheated, but he also knows that they have all been cheated, through history. His is the voice of reason, the voice of continuity, and the voice of caution. Early inthe novella he warns Kino that he has no model for what he is attempting—and he concludes that such ambition must be wrong, for no one else has attempted such an act.
    Despite this warning, however, Juan Tomás is loyal to Kino; and Steinbeck is careful to set the inner circle of family and friends against the broader, suspect community. People in the inner circle want Kino to succeed, even though their imaginations are stunned with the thought of his undertaking. They serve as a Greek chorus to echo, and reify, Kino’s thoughts. They literally follow him to see what he is going to do next, and their presence (and the muffled echo of their words as they explain to those farther away what is happening) serves as validation. In form, then, as well as in the undercurrent of doom that pervades
The Pearl,
Steinbeck creates the effects of the Greek tragedies he admired.
    Linguistically, however, he abjured the stately and restrained language of Euripides and Sophocles. Yet in shaping voices for his Mexican speakers, he created a dignified speech that resonates with pain. Steinbeck had a difficult task in capturing a non-English-speaking culture in his own language, yet the chief movement in the narrative occurs in the dialogue, in the voiced interchanges among the Mexican characters. Kino must ask to see the doctor. When he is refused, and his paltry eight seed pearls are handed back through the fence to accompany the lie that the doctor is out, he gives up any attempt to speak and relies on force as he bashes his hand against the wrought-iron fence that closes against him. When he asks the pearl dealer for more money, his hesitant speech again cripples him—but Steinbeck makes it clear that no matter what his eloquence, the dealers’ coalition would have kept