General

Who Wants to ProofRead Souls Essay?

Christian Acosta
Professor Goldman
English 201
December 7, 2013
Greed In Steinbeck's The Pearl
The book, The Pearl, by John Steinbeck, follows a man named Kino after he finds an incredibly large pearl. The people around Kino attempt to steal the pearl causing Kino to lose everything he had. In this novel, Steinbeck is trying to show the negative effects greed can have on people. We know this because he uses everything about the doctor to symbolize greed in humans. The author uses the pearl as a symbol that reflects the people around it showing how greed can corrupt something pure. The author also uses animal imagery to show how greed slowly turns Kino into an animal.
The doctor's actions towards Kino shows how dark human greed can be. Everything about the doctor represents greed. Steinbeck even used the doctor's race to symbolize greed. This becomes more clear when Steinbeck writes,
"This doctor was not of his people. This doctor was of a race which for nearly four hundred years had beaten and starved and robbed and despised Kino's race, and frightened it too, so that the indigene came humbly to the door. And as always when he came near to one of this race, Kino felt weak and afraid and angry at the same time." (Steinbeck)
The setting of the story takes place about four hundred years after the age of exploration. During that time the Europeans that came to the new world and abused the Native Americans that lived there for their own selfish purposes. When Kino came to him desperately needing a cure for his son's illness, he decides to not help Kino. In his conversation with his servant, he asks whether or not does Kino have money. Once he found out that Kino does not have any money, he gets his servant to send him away despite the fact that the case was urgent but he was fine with treating someone who "whose illness was age" (Steinbeck) as long as she the money to pay for it. We see that he would let a baby die, if there was no profit in saving it. The next example of the doctor's greed appears when Steinbeck writes,
"And when it was made plain who Kino was, the doctor grew stern and judicious at the same time. 'He is a client of mine,' the doctor said. 'I am treating his child for a scorpion sting.' And the doctor's eyes rolled up a little in their fat hammocks and he thought of Paris. He remembered the room he had lived in there as a great and luxurious place, and he remembered the hard-faced woman who had lived with him as a beautiful and kind girl, although she had been none of these three." (Steinbeck)
Once he hears that Kino has obtained wealth, then he decides that he wants to cure the baby. He begins to imagine Paris and luxurious things that Kino could bring to him. In the end, he doesn't even cure Coyotito, instead he decides to poison him because he felt that poisoning a child would be more profitable. A doctor poisoning anyone for money is immoral but the fact that Coyotito is an infant just adds to how heartless the doctor's behavior is because infants are usually seen as defenseless. Steinbeck uses the doctor to show how most humans would sacrifice their morals in order to obtain their own desires.
The pearls begins as a symbol of hope for a better future, but it was the actions of the characters that turned it into something evil. Humaira Aslam's "John Steinbeck's The Pearl: Kino's Journey Towards Subjectivity" tells us how the pearl is a symbol of hope when he writes,
"Possessing the pearl, Kino has to decide whether he wants to change his life, educate his son and be liberated or revert to his former life. The pearl promises hope and strength in a future life, which Kino can imagine, and even see visions of, in the surface of the pearl, whereas his former life has only pain and suffering, a life of humiliation. Thus, this splitting occurs and it haunts Kino, making him a misfit in his old way of life." (Aslam p.3)
Once Kino obtains his pearl, we begin to see him desire for more in his life. He starts to imagine everything we can do when he sells the pearl. He feels that he can use the wealth to bring opportunities for his people to become more civilized. Originally we see the pearl as something good because Kino hears triumphant music within the pearl as he imagines his new future, but soon the people around him begin trying to steal his hope for a better life so they can use it on themselves. The actions of those trying to steal the pearl turns the pearl becomes something dark. The pearl reflects the people around it, so when Kino was hopeful with it, the pearl was something beautiful, but the greed of everyone around it turned it into something ugly. In Harry Morris' work "The Pearl": Realism and Allegory," he describes the many symbols of the pearl when he writes,
"Already almost overburdened with many multiple symbolic equivalences-it stands for greed, for beauty, for materialism, for freedom from want, for evil, for good, for effete society, degenerate religion, and unethical medicine, for the strength and virtue of primitive societies-the pearl, with these words of Kino, stands also for Kino's soul." (Morris p.494)
The reason why Morris finds many symbols for the pearl is because the pearl is neutral. The pearl is neither good nor evil, but its the people around it that affects its symbolism. It is not the pearl's fault that the characters acted the way they did, it was their own greed that caused the problems. In the end, the pearl becomes beautiful again when Steinbeck writes,
"And Kino drew back his arm and flung the pearl with all his might. Kino and Juana watched it go, winking and glimmering under the setting sun. They saw the little splash in the distance, and they stood side by side watching the place for a long time." (Steinbeck)
The pearl was able to become beautiful again because Kino had gotten rid of his greed. Since the pearl's symbolism depends on the people around it, it was able to become good once Kino was finally able to resist the greed inside him. This shows us that only the greed inside people can destroy something that is supposed to be seen as pure.
The imagery in the novel describing Kino turning from human to animal shows the kind of effects that greed can have on a man. In Benson Jackson's work, The Short Novels of John Steinbeck: Critical Essays with a Checklist to Steinbeck Criticism, he describes Steinbeck's use of animal imagery when he writes, "From that point on, the animal imagery steadily becomes more grim and feral, as a primitive hatred rises in Kino" (Jackson p.153). In the beginning, Kino is not described as violent. He is a simple man and all he really cares about is his family. He wakes up every morning to his happy family and he searches for pearls. There was not more to that. It was only after he received the pearl that we see this everyday family man become animalistic. We begin to see Kino transform when Steinbeck writes,
"Kino looked down at her and his teeth were bared. He hissed at her like a snake, and Juana stared at him with wide unfrightened eyes, like a sheep before the butcher. She knew there was murder in him, and it was all right; she had accepted it, and she would not resist or even protest." (Steinbeck)
Kino is starting to become animalistic to the point that he would strike his wife because he was someone that only cared about his family. After his wife tried to throw away his pearl, his greed made him instinctively hit his wife. The author mentions that Juana saw murder in Kino and later in the story, Kino actually does kill someone over the pearl. When he sees that his canoe is destroyed, Steinbeck says "He was an animal now, for hiding, for attacking, and he lived only to preserve himself and his family." (Steinbeck). Kino becomes someone that is ready to kill others because Kino is only thinking instinctively to secure his own safety like an animal. Steinbeck is trying to show how humans would go through the same transformation in order to protect their own desires.
In conclusion, the novel, The Pearl, by John Steinbeck is designed to illustrate the negative effects that greed can have on a person. It can change someone to make that person heartless or even make the person lose their humanity. The doctor was used as a symbol to represent greed because everything he did was for his own sake. The pearl reflected the people around it so it started as something that was beautiful but the greed of others turned it into something that was evil. The animal imagery that was used to describe Kino was used to show the kind of transformation greed can cause people to have. In these cases, it was the greed of the person that made them they were they were. Steinbeck believes that only bad things can come when people get greedy.