How is Cannery Row like a tidepool Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

How is Cannery Row like a tidepool - Essay ExampleWhen the tide comes in again, these creatures will drive away and forage for food elsewhere, but for the duration of the pools existence, they are close neighbors. John Steinbecks novel Cannery Row is a portrait of a issue in a time, a collection of vignettes and subplots that gradu every last(predicate)y cohere into a rough narrative of local anaesthetic vagrants trying to do something nice for the local scientist. If it lacked even that fig leaf of a plot, though, it would still stand as a beautiful and moving evocation of Monterey, California in the early 1940s, when the picture had declined elsewhere but that sweet wartime money had yet to wash up on Montereys shore. In this place, a motley collection of characters are impel together, each of them making their way as best they can with what limited resources are available, living in a mutual web of dependence that lets them all continue to get by. Nobody in the story has a wh ole lot, but between them all, each person seems to manage to have just enough. Steinbecks moral stance on charity, kindness, and the necessity of doing right by ones fellow man is firm enough that if you shelve one of his books bordering to one of Ayn Rands, they both explode. ... The wider world exists, but far away. Doc receives orders from distant cities and mails them out, Lee Chong hides out in San Francisco once in a while, the nearby township of New Monterey can be glimpsed here and there in the narrative, but for the most part the characters have no outside resources in this tiny place called Monterey they are all in it together. The Monterey of the novel is a place where the tide went out a long time ago and has yet to come bear in. The Great Depression has not yet ended for the characters, and even the relatively successful Lee Chong exists at the leading edge of a wave of rent-free debts that never quite breaks into bankruptcy. As the narration puts it, maybe his wea lth was entirely in unpaid bills. Dora, who runs the local brothel called the Bear Flag, probably has the most virginal liquid assets of anyone in the story, but she manages to retain surprisingly little of her substantial income, instead funneling it into the community via endless charity. When the flu strikes Monterey in the middle of her busiest season on record, she and her girls become the nursing corps of the entire community, bringing soup and solace to the bedridden and ill all over town, including people who prefer to pretend her transmission line doesnt exist. The similarities between the community and the tidepool are many, but the central one is this it is a very small ecosystem full of beings that did not ask to be forgather together like this. There is not a lot of anything to go around, and nobody can leave, at least not until the tide comes back in, and as observed, the tide has been out from Monterey for a long time. It is