The Hero in John Steinbecks Cannery Row :: Cannery Row Essays

The Disappointment As Hero in Cannery Row    It is Doc, in Cannery Row, who gives the goal and nonteleological perspective which is to be found in such a large number of Steinbeck's works. For Doc, himself liberated from the get-get-get theory of the universe of the machine by goodness of his science, his separation, his delicacy, and his own refusal to be driven into either Social Importance or the job of Social Judge, demands that the young men of the Palace Flophouse are all inclusive images instead of minor ne'er-do-wells. What's more, what they represent is just this: the frenzy of a world in which the individuals who appreciate life most are those whom the world considers disappointments. For Mack and the young men unquestionably are disappointments in everything except for humankind and life itself:   Mack and the young men . . . are the Virtues, the Graces, the Beauties of the rushed ravaged madness of Monterey and the inestimable Monterey where men in dread and yearning demolish their stomachs in the battle to make sure about certain food, where men longing for love demolish everything adorable about them . . . On the planet governed by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, searched by daze jackals, Mac and the young men eat gently with the tigers, pet the wild eyed calves, and wrap up the morsels to take care of the ocean gulls of Cannery Row. What would it be able to benefit a man to pick up the entire world and go to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals? Mack and the young men maintain a strategic distance from the snare, step over the toxic substance. . . .   I think they make due in this specific world superior to other individuals. In when individuals destroy themselves with desire and apprehension and rapaciousness, they are loose. The entirety of our alleged effective men are wiped out men, with terrible stomachs, furthermore, terrible spirits, yet Mack and the young men are solid and inquisitively spotless. They can do what they need. They can fulfill their hungers without calling them something different.   What's more, the last oddity of all, Doc proceeds (a conundrum which confounds Ethan Hawley in The Winter of Our Discontent), is the way that ideals like genuineness, immediacy, and thoughtfulness are - in the realm of the machine - nearly