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 target and nonteleological perspective which is to be found in such a significant number of Steinbeck's works. For Doc, himself liberated from the get-get-get theory of the universe of the machine by ethicalness 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 simple ne'er-do-wells. What's more, what they represent is essentially this: the franticness of a world where the individuals who appreciate life most are those whom the world considers disappointments. For Mack and the young men assuredly are disappointments in everything except for mankind and life itself:   Mack and the young men . . . are the Virtues, the Graces, the Beauties of the rushed disfigured insanity of Monterey and the vast Monterey where men in dread and appetite devastate 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, rummaged by daze jackals, Mac and the young men feast carefully with the tigers, pet the wild yearlings, and wrap up the pieces 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 get by in this specific world superior to other individuals. In when individuals destroy themselves with desire and anxiety and greed, they are loose. The entirety of our alleged fruitful men are debilitated men, with terrible stomachs, what's more, awful spirits, yet Mack and the young men are sound and inquisitively perfect. They can do what they need. They can fulfill their cravings without calling them something different.   Also, the last Catch 22 of all, Doc proceeds (a conundrum which muddles Ethan Hawley in The Winter of Our Discontent), is the way that ethics like genuineness, immediacy, and thoughtfulness are - in the realm of the machine - nearly