The Pearl 1021individual competition for resources and power.
Human culture and history inscribe the material
objects of Kino’s world—the boats, utensils, knives,
guns, houses, and churches—with cultural meaning.
Steinbeck explains how “a town is a thing like a
colonial animal” similar to the organisms found in
a tide pool, with “a nervous system and a head and
shoulders and feet.” The Indian fishers and their
families, the Spanish merchants, the professional
classes of clergy and doctors are part of an intricate
web of relationships held together by traditions, cus-
toms, beliefs, memories, and stories—whole systems
of knowledge and power.
Kino’s discovery of the pearl ignites his per-
sonal ambition to transcend the limits placed on
him by class, race, and education and therefore
threatens to disrupt the intricate interdependencies
that make up the human community. His desires,
symbolized by the pearl, trigger the town’s reaction,
which Steinbeck likens, again, to a colonial animal’s:
“The poison sacs of the town began to manufac-
ture venom, and the town swelled and puffed with
the pressure of it.” Kino’s brother warns him that
personal and societal survival depends on staying
within traditional structures, saying, “We do know
that we are cheated from birth to the overcharge on
our coffins. But we survive. You have defied not only
the pearl buyers, but the whole structure, the whole
way of life, and I am afraid for you.” Stripped of his
human culture, at the end symbolically and literally
naked, Kino’s flight from his unknown assailants
can only reduce him to the level of biology, running
and hiding “as nearly all animals do when they are
pursued.”
Michael Zeitler
Sur vIvaL in The Pearl
A pearl, John Steinbeck tells us in his short novel,
The Pearl, has its origins in the natural world as an
oyster’s strategy for survival, the protective response
of an organism to a foreign irritant. “An accident
could happen to these oysters,” he writes, “a grain
of sand could lie in the folds of muscle and irritate
the flesh until in self-protection the flesh coated the
grain with a layer of smooth cement.” Symbolically,
the “Pearl of the World” that Kino finds is just such
an accidental irritant, one to which Kino, his family,
and his community must react as a matter of sur-
vival. Yet while the life or death biological struggle
is never far from center stage in The Pearl, the
metaphoric meaning embedded in the pearl’s cre-
ation—an outside, evil irritant that must be isolated
and destroyed to ensure survival—extends beyond
biological naturalism to the novel’s communal and
moral registers.
On the biological level, the struggle for survival
dominates the novel. Kino’s world is Darwinian, an
ecological balance of hunters and hunted. The sandy
shore where Kino and his kin build their homes,
the oyster beds where they hunt for pearls, and
the mountain stream where he fights his unknown
assailants are equally scenes of abundant life and
dangerous killing fields. They are “places of life
because of the water, and places of killing because
of the water, too.” In The Pearl, the human com-
munity lives in close proximity to nature and not
apart from its biology or its dangers. The dark night
stirs up ancient fears in Kino, “a rush of exhilaration;
some animal thing was moving in him so that he
was cautious and wary and dangerous.” The trackers
hunting Kino are just other predators; Kino another
prey: “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 . . . ”
Steinbeck connects through simile an individual
organism’s instinct for survival and similar commu-
nal responses to danger. “The town,” he writes, “is a
thing like a colonial animal” with its own nervous
system and emotions, and, like a colonial animal, it
reacts to protect itself from perceived threats to its
equilibrium. Kino’s discovery of the “Pearl of the
World” and his ambition to appropriate its value to
advance himself and his family poses exactly such
a threat to the town’s class, educational and racial
hierarchies. Just as the oyster ensures its survival by
separating the irritating grain of sand from the folds
of muscle, so the town isolates Kino and his family.
“The poison sacs of the town began to manufacture
venom,” Steinbeck writes, “and the town swelled
and puffed with the pressure of it.” Kino’s brother
warns him of the dangers inherent in disregarding
the town’s traditional social structures, and indeed,
the reintegration of Kino and Juana into the town