The Pearl Read Online Free

the pricelow. In the moving scenes between Kino and Juana, few words are used, even though those scenes are decisive points in the narrative.
    To replace verbal meaning, Steinbeck creates a technique suitable for a film script but unexpected in a written text: He uses music both to express mood and to replace dialogue. His “Song of the Family,” a positive and encouraging sound, is set against the “Song of Evil” or the “Song of the Pearl.” What happens in the struggles among the refrains anticipates the narrative conflicts. Steinbeck uses these musical motifs to suggest the complexity of Kino’s decisions, as in his description of the “Song of the Family” underlying the “Song of Danger,” when Kino is ready to take on the three trackers after he has hidden Juana and Coyotito in the cave. His slow descent into the morass of evil, naked so that his white clothing does not give him away, is surely a metaphor for the person going to meet the test of his life, for his soul, alone.
    As Steinbeck forces the reader to listen for something other than language in
The Pearl,
he moves back toward an earlier culture of oral communication instead of written. (Jackson Benson notes that Steinbeck was reading folktales in Spanish as he began writing
The Pearl,
evidently looking for a tonal base that would allow him the resonance of that language without leaving the English his readers expected.) His use of the parable form was another means of insisting that Kino’s story was archetypal, common to all human interaction. Steinbeck often used literary forms in ironic ways: Here, the parable that instructs non-believers in what they must do to enter the kingdom of heaven takes on a kind of sly cynicism as it becomes a vehicle to picture a corrupt and murderous culture. The morality inscribed in
The Pearl
is a reverse kind of instruction: Kino has done nothing wrong except fail to recognize evil when it appears (in the object of the beautiful pearl). He can live as pure a life as he knows, but nothing will bring sanity back into his existence except getting rid of the object of beauty. His community cannot help him; neither can he help himself, unaware and unsuspecting as he is. The irony of Steinbeck’s pearl narrative is that no god appears to save Kino, his child, or his family. He must save himself—and he can do that only by reconciling the female with the male, only by listening to Juana.
    His wife speaks wisely throughout the narrative when she tells him repeatedly that the pearl is evil and would destroy them, but it remains for Kino to learn to live with tragedy before he can hear her. (Steinbeck shows Juana’s broad philosophical base when he remarks that she draws on a “combination of prayer and magic, her Hail Marys and her ancient intercession.”) As the book ends, Kino’s offering her the pearl so that she can throw it away is his apology for his obtuseness, his sinful error in failing to understand that greed can corrupt the soul. Her refusing the jewel so that he can empower himself by casting it into the sea is Juana’s means of allowing Kino to reclaim some part of his badly damaged manhood. This interplay between husband and wife suggests that their marriage will survive the death of their child, but Steinbeck has also created such a poignant tenor of mourning that few readers expect either Kino or Juana to recover their earlier happiness.
    The metaphoric qualities of
The Pearl
convey much of its meaning. For some readers, the bleak ending of the novella is despairing—and disspiriting. For others, responsive to Steinbeck’s musical motifs and the obvious harmonyin the resolve of Juana and Kino to get rid of the pearl, the ending is a relief, a release, as the couple attempt to go back to their earlier life. Steinbeck suggests that Kino has learned to accept defeat, and his attitude toward the tragic death of Coyotito is the appropriate one of ineradicable grief for the loss of a human being, rather