Cannery Row Analysis Essay

In society, often our perspective of people is shaped by their socioeconomic status. People center their values based upon various other origins, such as money or other material things, as opposed to personality to grasp a more authentic understanding of a person.
However, in Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck, the characters are based on their individual values and personalities, instead of their material belongings. The people of Cannery Row are interdependent, yet the loneliness of some characters displays that even the “undesirables” of our world need community. Steinbeck created a setting in which there were two sides. On one hand, Cannery Row is a bustling town, where everyone was always moving quickly. Steinbeck describes it as “Gathered and scattered, tin and iron and splintered wood, chipped pavement, and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses.”
Despite that, it is a place where many unwanted people of society go, including the bums, such as Mack and the Boys, or whores from the whorehouse. Steinbeck wrote,
“Its inhabitants are, as one man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing.” (1)
Rather than judge people such as Mack and the Boys, Steinbeck takes a different perspective, one of positivity, because these men all proceed with freedom and true human integrity. Malcolm Cowley shared this view in his critical essay of Cannery Row. Cowley writes,
“He continues that successful men in the world have both bad health and bad souls because they "tear themse...

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... it functions. Cannery Row also shows how much everyone truly needs community in our society, even the Undesirables of the world. Many characters throughout the novel show this, such as Doc with the loneliness he presents. The community in Cannery Row encompasses a very wide variety of people, from whores to bums to strange storeowners. Although these people are all independent and completely different, they are all interconnected and are willing to support each-other. In Cannery Row, Steinbeck presents a structure of different moral values, those which make a person good, and also those who are valued by society, but may be valued for the wrong reasons. Steinbeck defines what he thinks a good person is, using the characters in the book as examples. He shows that what society sees as an ideal person may not be as good as the traits that people generally scorn.