Indoors, the doctor sits up in bed, surrounded by luxuries.
He feasts on biscuits and hot chocolate and thinks nostalgically
of Paris. When the servant interrupts the doctor’s reverie to announce Kino’s
visit, the doctor bitterly demands to know if Kino has money to
pay for the treatment. Kino gives the servant eight small pearls, but
soon the servant returns to Kino with them, explaining that the doctor
has been called out to attend to a serious case. With this dismissal,
the procession breaks up, leaving Kino furious and ashamed. Standing
in shock in front of the closed gate, Kino strikes out in anger,
smashing his fist into the barrier and bloodying his knuckles.
Analysis
As its short, simple sentences and heavily symbolic moral
overtones make evident, The Pearl is based on the
form of biblical parable, and the simple natural beauty of the opening
scene recalls the beauty and innocence of the Garden of Eden before
Adam and Eve’s fall. Though the comparison is not made explicitly,
it is nevertheless an apt one—like Adam and Eve, Kino and Juana
make choices later in the story that cause them to lose their innocence
and force them to leave their paradise for the hardships of the
wider world. The cluster of brush houses by the sea where Kino and
Juana live functions as a kind of paradise, in which man and woman
live together in a state of nature. Steinbeck focuses on the family’s
rustic simplicity and on its reverence for a higher power. Steinbeck
uses repetitious language, which evokes the Bible and other religious
literature, to underscore the family’s spirituality. This scriptural
structure is especially evident in Steinbeck’s frequent use of the
word “and” to drive the narrative: “And a goat came near and sniffed
at him”; “And the rhythm of the family song was the grinding stone”;
“And he drank a little pulque and that was breakfast.”
Kino’s knowledge of the world is not expansive, but his
store of traditional songs and his contented, familiar manner of
surveying his meager territory show that he is intimately acquainted
with every aspect of the existence he knows. Kino frequently hears
traditional songs in his head that express his mood or his sense
of his environment—when he is content at home in this chapter, he
hears the soothing rhythms of the Song of the Family, for instance,
but when he is in trouble later in the novella he hears the alarming
Song of Danger. Kino’s inner soundtrack highlights The Pearl’s
original conception as a film project—the audience would actually
have heard these songs and experienced them as recurring motifs.
It also points to the oral nature of Kino’s culture, in which songs
are passed down from generation to generation and assume such a
position of psychological importance that they actually provide
an internal context without which Kino is unable to interpret his
own feelings.
Steinbeck seems to suggest that the imminent disruption
of Kino’s Eden, like the harmony that precedes it, is the work of
a divine power. Like Kino, who observes the ants as though he were
a detached God, the God watching over Kino—and indeed all humanity
in the text—shows indifference to the cruel combination of successes
and failures that people encounter. As Kino surveys the surroundings
of his brush house, wild doves fly and ruffled roosters fight, symbolizing
the way good and evil haphazardly commingle.
The scorpion that brings terror into Kino’s household
represents the work of a divine agent. In Christian literature,
scorpions traditionally symbolize evil, and the streak of sunlight
that falls on the scorpion as it rests on the hanging box rope seems
a heavenly spotlight, setting the drama in motion. With the Song
of Evil drowning out the Song of Family, Kino must take control
of his family’s destiny after this unkind twist of fate.
Steinbeck’s writing evinces contempt for the town doctor,
who surrounds himself with the vulgar trappings of European “civilized living.”
To Steinbeck, the doctor’s notion of civilization is utterly materialistic
and devoid of the complex spirituality so integral to Kino and Juana’s
life. Nevertheless, the doctor’s barbaric beliefs hold sway in this
colonial context, and the divide between rich and poor seems racially
and inflexibly defined.
