Cannery Row Dbq

. In particular the outsiders and bohemians. The result was the novel Cannery Row. Knowing that civilians in general and GI’s in particular wanted to read something peaceful and funny, Steinbeck, mulling over pleasant experiences in the 1930s, decided on a second novel about Monterey, California, or rather about one area of that celebrated town.
Although World War II is not mentioned in Cannery Row, its presence haunts the book by its absence, for at the time of the novel’s composition, not just the United States but the entire world was mobilized and involved in strenuous battle. Cannery Row presents a picture of a society that functions peacefully despite human weaknesses and conflicts. It presents a vision of the world as an organism composed

Like Sea of Cortez published a few years earlier, the novel was profoundly influenced by the mind, character and life of Ed Ricketts. Cannery Row begins with the inscription: “For Ed Ricketts, who knows why or should.” In the novel Ricketts becomes Doc, biologist and the owner of Western Biological Laboratory, who lives in the Row, a bohemian section near the fish canneries in Monterey. Doc, his lab, and his way of life comprise the nucleus of the small community. Across the street from his lab is Lee Chong’s grocery, and in the lot next that the grocery live Mack and the boys. Dora’s Bear Flag Restaurant, a respectable whorehouse and a couple who live in a deserted cannery boiler also share a

It describes Cannery Row as a physical place and condition: “the gathered and scattered tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honkey tonks, restaurants and whore houses and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses” (1). The inhabitants of Cannery Row are introduced as “whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches” which “means everybody,” who, when looked at “through another peephole,” are also “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men” (1). Chapters one through six set up the environment for the action that will develop during the rest of the novel. In these chapters the most important characters are introduced in their habitat: Lee Chong in his grocery store, Mack and the boys in the Palace Flophouse, Dora Flood and her girls in the Bear Flag Restaurant and Doc at Western Biological Laboratory and out collecting in the tide pools. Two of the four suicides mentioned in the book are also introduced in the first six chapters: Horace Abbeville, who shoots himself on a pile of fishmeal and William, the dark and lonesome looking watchman at the Bear Flag who stick an icepick in his own heart. The inhabitants of Cannery Row either die pathetically or