1020 steinbeck, John
Stories like that of Kino and the great pearl also
function as parables of applied group wisdom and
enforcers of the traditional moral codes necessary
for the town’s survival: “As with all retold tales that
are in people’s hearts, there are only good things
and bad things and black things and white things.”
Throughout his life, Kino has heard similar stories
of the dangers awaiting those who challenge custom
and tradition.
Humans interact with their environment through
culture and community, surviving not so much indi-
vidually through competition but together through
cooperation and adaptation. Kino, even in his des-
peration to escape his pursuers, will not steal a canoe,
for “the killing of a man was not as evil as the killing
of a boat.” Without a canoe, a man cannot survive,
cannot feed his family. It represents the collective
knowledge of the village; a culture passed down and
improved through generations. The broken canoe
symbolizes Kino’s separation from his community,
the transgression of his ambition against the social
patterns of village life. He must steal away in the
dark, as the town “closed itself against the night.”
Isolated from his culture, Kino “was an animal now,
for hiding, for attacking, and he lived only to protect
himself and his family.”
Michael Zeitler
nature in The Pearl
John Steinbeck’s allegorical novella The Pearl has
its origins in the author’s study of marine biology.
Steinbeck studied marine life at Stanford University
in the 1920s and by the early 1930s had developed a
long-standing friendship and intellectual collabora-
tion with the biologist (and Pacific Grove, Califor-
nia, neighbor) Ed Ricketts, the “Doc” of Cannery
Row and author of the classic textbook Between
Pacif ic Tides (1939). Ricketts—who had studied at
the University of Chicago under W. C. Allee, an
early and influential ecologist who examined the
effects of environmental stimuli on cooperative
group behavior among invertebrates—served as
a major influence on Steinbeck’s thinking. Long
before their joint 1940 biological expedition to the
Sea of Cortez, where Steinbeck first encountered
the story of the poor Indian fisherman who discov-
ered the Great Pearl of the World, he and Ricketts
explored the intertidal zones of the Pacific Coast
and speculated on similar sociobiological patterns in
human ecology. In his forward to the second (1948)
edition of Between Pacif ic Tides, Steinbeck notes
that “there are answers to the world questions in the
little animals of tide pools, in their relations one to
another.” Thus, while the story of Kino, Juana, and
the pearl touches on such themes as ambition, com-
munity, tradition, fate, race, survival, and justice,
it continually frames these issues within the natural
world, the biological struggle for survival.
Kino’s natural world, like Darwin’s, is a fierce
struggle for survival. As dawn breaks over the Sea
of Cortez, animals begin the hunt for food: Pigs
root in the underbrush, roosters feint at each other
in elaborate displays, and hawks hunt mice. Kino
watches with “the detachment of God” as an antlion
traps an ant. Humanity does not stand apart. A
scorpion instinctually reacts to the threat of Kino’s
presence and attacks, stinging the baby, Coyotito.
Kino, just as instinctually, crushes it, stamping his
enemy “until it was only a fragment.” Steinbeck also
makes it clear that what is death to one is life to
another. The fishing beds necessary for the survival
of Kino’s family are home to great fishes that eat
small fishes. The little mountain spring where Kino
finds temporary shelter is both an oasis of life and
a deadly killing ground. The narrator explains, “The
little pools of water were places of life because of the
water, and places of killing because of the water, too.”
Again, humans are a part of the web. The town’s
pearl buyers, as they prepare to cheat Kino, have eyes
“as steady, and cruel and unwinking as a hawk’s.” The
trackers hunting Kino and Juana reenact the preda-
tor and prey relationship: “He [Kino] knew these
inland hunters. In a country where there is little
game they managed to live because of their ability
to hunt, and they were hunting him. They scuttled
over the ground like animals and found a sign . . .”
Although Steinbeck the artist might focus on
the conflicts of the human heart, for Steinbeck the
naturalist, the unit of study cannot be the individual
organism but a web: the interdependent biological
ecosystem. Thinking ecologically offers the pos-
sibility that human adaptation and cooperation are
an integral part of natural selection, and therefore
human culture has as much evolutionary value as