Literature Analysis # 5: Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

Cannery Row

by John Steinbeck  

Literature Analysis

By Hayden Robel

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen" and he would have meant the same thing.” – John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

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GENERAL______________________________________

1. Briefly summarize the plot of the novel you read, and explain how the narrative fulfills the author's purpose (based on your well-informed interpretation of same).

2. Succinctly describe the theme of the novel. Avoid clichés.

3. Describe the author's tone. Include a minimum of three excerpts that illustrate your point(s).

4. Describe a minimum of ten literary elements/techniques you observed that strengthened your understanding of the author's purpose, the text's theme and/or your sense of the tone. For each, please include textual support to help illustrate the point for your readers. (Please include edition and page numbers for easy reference.)

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1. “How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise—the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream—be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book—to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.” The same quote is true to attempting a summarization of this novel. A master of the written craft, nearly unparallel by even today’s contemporary “standards”, John Steinbeck remains one of the greatest American writers in the history of the medium (and that’s a looong history). Steinbeck’s prodigious career spans the vicissitudes, voluminous expanse of the twentieth century, the “American century”, his litany of works, each meaningfully impacting, influencing if not completely constructing the nature of American literature as a whole. John Steinbeck’s works capturing the spirit of the United States, of Americans. Cannery Row is one such novella. From a Chinese immigrant grocer (Lee Chong), a generous but dually coldhearted businessman, to a marine biologist (Doc) “A man who ministers sick puppies and unhappy souls” Steinbeck’s Cannery Row has no underlying, overarching, linear plotline, nor even an established protagonist, central cast, composed only of brief, interspersed vignettes, a one-off episodic structure with no real structure. No, with Cannery Row John Steinbeck set out to paint a fantastically idealized portrait unto a romanticized yet all to real, humanized canvas. With his novel Steinbeck set out to record, to capture the urban magic of Monterey, California, capture the soul of a city, of a street, of its denizens, of Cannery Row.

2. As a true summarization of Cannery Row is arduous, a theme is so to singularly indefinable. Cannery Row utilizes an episodic series of vignette shorts often times to convey themes ranging from morality, the inherent nature of man, to monitarial materialism.  Yet one thematical motif flows as the undercurrent, lifeblood of the entire novel: a sense of community. (Without spoiling specifics of the novels ending) Steinbeck’s purpose (of course in my opinion) with Cannery Row, aside from capturing the zeitgeist of the region and its inhabitants, was to emphasize the imperative of community. Not necessarily focusing upon the localized region of Monterey, Cannery Row is Steinbeck’s allegory of mankind’s need for community, to live not as one but as one global, diverse, community. Reliant, self-reliant, independent, interdependent, a species of separate individuals but a species all the same. Steinbeck thru the eponymous Cannery Row sought to tell the story of such a place, tell the stories, the lives of Monterey indigenous, but so to a lesson to everyone, our own lives. Life is just that: a story of one yet everyone. A grand story made up of many smaller ones.

3.

·        “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen" and he would have meant the same thing.”

·        “Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool on the tip of the Peninsula. It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals.”

·        “Cannery Row becomes itself again, after the canning is stopped, done-quiet and magical. Its normal life returns.”

Romanticized yet all the while riveted to reality, Steinbeck’s unmistakable writing prowess lends itself to an expertly executed tone complementing, if not the reason for, the mood of the novel’s tales. As a frequent visitor of Monterey and Cannery Row in fact, I too can’t help but feel the same sense of aesthetic, je ne sais quoi quality that Steinbeck attempts (and succeeds in my opinion) to describe throughout Cannery Row. It envelops you as you amble about the port and wharfs, as if a babe nestled coddled in the tranquil, warm thralls of its sleepy but ever-alive urban magic. A blanketing sense of comfort rarely ever found or matched. Steinbeck’s tone epitomizes this sense of urban magic, his tone notably romantic in its various seaside riffs, sentimental in its vivid abstractions. Indeed no one does tone exactly like John Steinbeck, Cannery Row one of his best examples.  

4. Here we go, ad infinitum.

·        Imagery: “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.” (pg. 1) Wow, unbelievable, John Steinbeck is the master of imagery to which I hope I can ever hope to aspire towards, achieve.

·        Metaphor: “Mack and the boys, too, spinning in their orbits. They 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 their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food.” (pg. 15) Steinbeck here utilizes the literary element of metaphor ascribing Mack (a homeless bum) and his friends as the “Virtues, the Graces, the Beauties of the hurried mangled craziness of Monterey” Steinbeck noting that they are above the avaricious greed of material lusting men/women, “men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food.” The certain food a symbol for money/material wealth to which everyone else seems to only seek and prioritize above all else, destroying what makes us human, yet so to exhibiting what makes us human all the same.

·        Characterization: “What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals? Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped, poisoned and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-the-town, thieves, rascals, bums.” (pg. 16) Steinbeck characterizes the money lusting men/women of Monterey, and allegorically many of our world, as “trapped, poisoned, and trussed up” these people “trussed” in their own selfish-goals, unlike the ironically material-less Mack and friends. 

·        Personification: “…Then cannery whistles scream and all over town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to work. They come running to clean and cut and pack and cook and can the fish. The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers of fish pour in and out of the boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty (pg. 2) Do I really even need to state how much personification is in this mere paragraph, yeah try the entire book, its amazing! Steinbeck’s skill is blatantly evident.

·        Symbolism: “Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool on the tip of the Peninsula. It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals.” (pg. 31) the final lines of this excerpt is a commentary on the proclivities of our own species, if you didn’t catch Steinbeck’s ocean drifts.

·        Imagery: “The anemones expand like soft and brilliant flowers, inviting any tired and perplexed animal to lie for a moment in their arms, and when some small crab or tide pool Johnnie accepts the green and purple invitation, the petals whip in, the stinging cells shoot tiny narcotic needles into the prey and it grows weak and perhaps sleepy while the searing caustic digestive acids melt its body down.”(pg. 33) Cant you feel the tides as your toes are swallow by coarse beach sand? I know I can. The imagery here is incredibly visceral as if observing the violent consumption of one living being by another, life by life ending life.

·         Simile: “Cats drip over the fences and slither like syrup over the ground to look for fish heads.” (pg. 81) How does a cat drip? J

·        Personification: “The water chuckled on the stones where it went out of the deep pool.” (pg. 78) How can water chuckle you ask? Steinbeck’s personification that’s how!

·        Imagery: “The Carmel is a lovely little river.  It isn’t very long but in its course it has everything a river should have.  It rises in the mountains, and tumbles down a while, runs through shallows, is dammed to make a lake, spills over the dam, crackles among round boulders, wanders lazily under sycamores, spills into pools where trout live, drops in against banks where crayfish live.  In the winter it becomes a torrent, a mean little fierce river, and in the summer it is a place for children to wade in and for fishermen to wander in.  Frogs blink from its banks and the deep ferns grow beside it.  Deer and foxes come to drink from it, secretly in the morning and evening, and now and then a mountain lion crouched flat laps its water.  The farms of the rich little valley back up to the river and take in water for the orchards and vegetables.  The quail call beside it and the wild doves come whistling in at dusk.  Raccoons pace its edges looking for frogs.  It’s everything a river should be.”  (pg. 72) Sorry couldn’t help myself, I had to add more imagery. Steinbeck’s imagery is just so….JUST READ THE BOOK AND YOU’LL UNDERSTAND!

·        Tone: “Cannery Row becomes itself again, after the canning is stopped, done-quiet and magical. Its normal life returns.” (pg. 7) Steinbeck’s tone is undeniably sentimental, he like all who traverse there, comfortably coddled in the thralls, blanket of Cannery Row’s, Monterey’s magic.

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CHARACTERIZATION__________________________

1. Describe two examples of direct characterization and two examples of indirect characterization.  Why does the author use both approaches, and to what end (i.e., what is your lasting impression of the character as a result)?

2. Does the author's syntax and/or diction change when s/he focuses on character?  How?  Example(s)?

3. Is the protagonist static or dynamic?  Flat or round?  Explain.

4. After reading the book did you come away feeling like you'd met a person or read a character?  Analyze one textual example that illustrates your reaction.

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                  1.

Direct Characterization

·        EXAMPLE 1:

·        “Everyone who knew [Doc] was indebted to him. And everyone who thought of him thought next, "I really must do something nice for Doc."

·        EXAMPLE 2:

·        “What [Lee Chong] did with his money, no one ever knew. Perhaps he didn't get it. Maybe his wealth was entirely in unpaid bills. But he lived well and had the respect of all his neighbors”

Indirect characterization

·        EXAMPLE 1:

·        “And the loneliness—the desolate cold aloneness of the landscape made Andy whimper because there wasn't anybody at all in the world and he was left.”

·        EXAMPLE 2:

·        “Everyone in town was more or less affected by the skater. Trade fell off out of sight of him and got better the nearer you came to Holman's. Mack and the boys went up and looked for a moment and then went back to the Palace. They couldn't see that it made much sense.”

After completing now five separate literature analysis, if you haven’t caught on to my own analysis on this question here’s the stint, “Any writers worth their royalties utilize both direct and indirect characterization.” And John Steinbeck deserves some hefty royalties (postmortem even!). As substantiated by the direct examples, Steinbeck employs more often then not this type of characterization, preferring to layer levels of character complexity in the actions of his “actors”. Indirect characterization is used by the writer when communicating not just a facet of a given character such as indirect example one’s Andy believing himself the only “real” “conscious” person left walking, but frequently to relate a scene to a specific theme. Subsequently Steinbeck fleshes out his characters more realistically as people defined by their actions, not thoughts or directly expressed archetypal features.

2.

·        “The Carmel is a lovely little river.  It isn’t very long but in its course it has everything a river should have.  It rises in the mountains, and tumbles down a while, runs through shallows, is dammed to make a lake, spills over the dam, crackles among round boulders, wanders lazily under sycamores, spills into pools where trout live, drops in against banks where crayfish live.  In the winter it becomes a torrent, a mean little fierce river, and in the summer it is a place for children to wade in and for fishermen to wander in.  Frogs blink from its banks and the deep ferns grow beside it.  Deer and foxes come to drink from it, secretly in the morning and evening, and now and then a mountain lion crouched flat laps its water.  The farms of the rich little valley back up to the river and take in water for the orchards and vegetables.  The quail call beside it and the wild doves come whistling in at dusk.  Raccoons pace its edges looking for frogs.  It’s everything a river should be.” 

·        “Everyone who knew [Doc] was indebted to him. And everyone who thought of him thought next, "I really must do something nice for Doc."

Yep. Steinbeck’s syntax notably differs from his usually visually extravagant style, panache prose flair. Just by a cursory glance you can observe Steinbeck’s syntax with descriptive prose composed of verbose and vivid picture pieces building the setting whilst characterization almost takes a backseat with its brevity in length/description of character and their respective actions. So yes, yep indeed his syntax shifts visibly when transitioning to characterization pieces.

3. UGH! Cannery Row’s cast is rather erratic and as I stated in the beginning is, save for a few, often times a rotary of one time, one story, characters. So there really is no “protagonist” even plural for that matter, thus this question cannot be answered. I will answer/give my opinion on the “dynamic” quality of the characters in general in the proceeding question however.

4.

·        "I love you…” Frankie said to Doc one afternoon. “Oh.” Doc smiled. “I love you too.”

The nature of Cannery Row as John Steinbeck sought to capture is undeniably idyllically romanticized, sentimental in its world building of the setting as well as occasionally trope-filled with some simple, stereotypical type-cast characters (like Mack arguably as the archetype of a carefree, little troubled, homeless man innocent and absent of most realistically common avarices like that of greed, alcohol, etc.) but the excerpt above, one of so many throughout the novel, can only express the ultimately inexpressible complexity of man. Doc is the closet character the novel has to a “main protagonist” for good reason. He is kind a “man who ministers sick puppies and unhappy souls” yet at one point in the novel he beats the living !@#@$@ out of Mack after the kindhearted, good intentioned transient accidentally obliterated his lab, and at another point essentially adopts a mentally challenged child (Frankie; the quote above deriving from a conversation between the two) who has no place to go, without anyone who really loves him. Just like Doc. Doc is Steinbeck’s tool to some degree.  Doc before Frankie was a slave to his own devices, cold, scientific routine and rationale, having no interest really in human affairs though he was always nice to his fellow man (truthfully he avoided them as he was a recluse in his seaside lab). Thus Doc is a symbol for what compassion can do. Doc by the end of the novel, Frankie at his side, realized his rationale would only lead to a lonely husk of an existence, no love from a fellow human being, he found the soul of community, restoring his own soul. This all accomplished without even a detonated sentence in the novel truly detailing the turn of character transformation. So indeed, Doc and many of the other characters are “dynamic”, as “dynamic” as us “real” human beings with depth and breathe of complexity in character, faults and flaws mirroring are self-centered society. Cannery Row an allegory for mankind’s inherent, but often times ignored, need for community. Reliant, self-reliant, independent, interdependent, a species of separate individuals but a species all the same. For life is just that: a story of one yet everyone. A grand story made up of many smaller ones.