1018 steinbeck, John
are the loneliest guys in the world,” George tells his
weak-minded traveling companion Lennie. “They
got no family. They don’t belong no place. . . . They
ain’t got nothing to look forward to.”
Nearly all of the characters—not just George
and Lennie, but Candy, Crooks, and even Curley’s
wife—suffer from an isolation that renders them
powerless and vulnerable. Indeed, the need for com-
panionship at any price seems to compel from them
confessions of weakness and loneliness that, if any-
thing, make them even more vulnerable. Old Candy,
a disabled ranch hand now in charge of cleaning
the bunkhouse because he can no longer work in
the fields, awaits the inevitable day when he will be
dismissed, only to lose both income and companion-
ship. When his only source of affection, an old and
feeble dog, is euthanized by his fellow ranch hands,
Candy recognizes his own fate. “You see what they
done to my dog tonight? They say he wasn’t no
good to himself nor nobody else. When they can me
here I wisht somebody’d shoot me. But they won’t
do nothing like that. I won’t have no place to go, an’
I can’t get no more jobs.” Crooks, the black stable
keeper, is ostracized by the others and must eat and
bunk alone. Only Lennie, ignorant of racial norms,
will join him in his room for companionship. “A guy
needs somebody—to be near him,” Crooks explains.
“A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody.” Even Cur-
ley’s wife, bored and lonely in her marriage, joins
the other outcasts gathered in Crooks’s room. “I
get lonely,” she later tells Lennie. “You can talk to
people, but I can’t talk to nobody but Curley. Else
he gets mad. How’d you like not to talk to anybody?”
Although they are drawn together by the need
for companionship, Steinbeck’s characters are often
hampered in their efforts to connect with others by
the effects of prolonged isolation. “I seen the guys
that go around on the ranches alone,” George tells
Slim. “That ain’t no good. They don’t have no fun.
After a long time they get mean.” Steinbeck illus-
trates this theme in the interactions between Crooks
and Lennie and again in the scene that follows
between Curley’s wife and Crooks. When Lennie,
looking for his new puppy, inadvertently breaks the
ranch’s racial taboos and intrudes on Crooks’s isola-
tion, the stable keeper gradually opens up to him,
expressing his long-repressed anger and frustration
to a sympathetic ear without fear of white retribu-
tion. At first, he responds to Lennie by verbalizing
his own doubts and mistrust of humanity’s potential
for honest loyalty. Then, sensing Lennie’s own fear,
emotional vulnerability, and complete dependence
on George, Crooks torments his victim with con-
tinued suggestions that one day George will not
be there. His face, Steinbeck tells us, “lighted with
pleasure in his torture.” Later, Curley’s wife—the
only female on the ranch and kept under her jealous
husband’s strict watch—confesses her loneliness to
Crooks, Candy, and Lennie. Sensing trouble, they
try to force her to leave. She, in turn, retaliates, aware
of Crooks’s racial vulnerability. One word from her,
she implies, is all it would take to incite a lynching.
“For a moment,” Steinbeck writes, “she stood over
him as though waiting for him to move so that she
could whip at him again; but Crooks sat perfectly
still, his eyes averted, everything that might be hurt
drawn in.”
Ironically, Steinbeck seems to imply that our
fears are both a cause and effect of our isolation.
“Ain’t many guys travel around together,” Slim tells
George. “Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world
is scared of each other.” Later, Curley’s wife repeats
the charge: “You’re all scared of each other. Ever’
one of you’s scared the rest is goin’ to get something
on you.” Outcasts like Candy, Crooks, and Curley’s
wife are naturally fearful of communities that define
them as different. They have been disappointed too
many times. Yet that same fear, that universal need
to be accepted by the group, only encourages them
to victimize others.
Michael ZeitlerSTEiNbECk, JoHN The Pearl (1947)
First published in 1947, John Steinbeck’s novella
The Pearl is based on a Mexican folktale. It is a
short, deceptively simple story about a poor fisher-
man, Kino, who finds the “pearl of the world” and,
with this sudden good fortune, the potential for
great wealth. Instead of the expected happiness,
however, Kino’s discovery brings tragic and unfore-
seen consequences to his family. The Pearl is both
an exciting tale of flight and pursuit and an allegory
of the destructive consequences of greed, ambition,