Cannery Row

Cannery Row by john Steinbeck

The Autor

John Steinbeck is born in 1902 in Salinas, California. He went to university, left six years later without taking a degree. Then he went to New York as a journalist. In this time, 1929, his first novel was published. He married and returned to California and wrote several novels like "Of Mice and Men" or, "The Grapes of Wrath". He became also a filmmaker. In 1945 he published "Cannery Row". The last decades of his life he spent in New York and Sag Harbor with his third wife. In 1962 he won the Nobel Price and died in 1968.

Structure

The novel doesn’t tell a great story. It rather cosists of little stories about the people of Monterey, this little town in California where sardines were processed. The place the sardines are put into cans is called "Cannery Row". Steinbeck himself lived there long time. The stories are about the "gathered and the scattered" or, like the first page of the book describes : BOOK PAGE 5 (LINES 7 - 12). Most of the treated people had been friends of Steinbeck. Therefore this novel is a kind of an autobiographical book.

Summary

For this summeary i’ve picked up only the anecdotes of the main caracters Doc, Lee Chong, and Mack and his boys.

Mack and the boys ask Lee Chong to live in a house, he recently became owner, known ever after as the Palace Flophouse. Lee Chong has to agree and Mack and the boys move in.

They furnish the house and want to give a party for doc because Doc lets them work for him from time to time if they need money, and he helps them in every other situation. For the party Mack and they boys need some money and they ask Doc for work. Doc askes them to collect four hundred frogs while he has to go to south California to collect some octopi.



To collect the frogs they need a car. Lee Chong finally agrees to lend them his old T - Model Ford. After several difficulties they arrive at Carmel river and get drunk while waiting the dawn. In a good condition they go for frog hunt and collect a hughe amount of them.

Because Doc isn’t back yet, Mack and the boys pay with the frogs at Lee Chong’s grocery for party decoration and meat. Lee will sell the frogs later to Doc. Paying with frogs, Mack and his boys can decorate Doc’s laboratory, where the party will take place, before Doc comes back from his octopi - collection in southern California. They plan a kind of a welcome - back - party.

When the party starts Doc isn’t back yet and it soon gets out of control. The result is a broken door, a broken phonograph, broken windows, records, books, and a great mess in Doc’s laboratory. But the worst thing is that the frogs disappeared. Doc comes back from south California the day after his welcome - back - party.

After this failure Mack and the boys become social outcasts in Cannery Row because everyone thinks their intention was to have a party in absent people’s property and the absent, Doc, is a very popular man.

Mack goes to ask Dora Flood what would be the best thing they could do for doc and to be respected again in Cannery Row. Her proposal is another party, this time with Doc.

With Dora’s connections the news spread fast and almost every inhabitant of Cannery Row wants to come to Doc‘s surprise - birthday party. Since everyone is concerned about what gift to get, Doc was bound to hear of about the party and has the possibility to prepare himself this time.

(Because it isn’t a very exciting story, i’ll tell you how it ends.)

The day of the party, Doc gives himself surprised and half the town joins the party in Doc‘s laboratory. The mornig after it’s the same mess as the last time. Doc’s very sad, not absolutely about the mess, but simply about his life, his lost girls and just everything.







Themes

- Alcoolism (Doc, Mack and the boys)

- The relationship between the Individual an society. In the novel this two things correspond to loneliness and, on the other side the partys.

But the novel’s not a social criticism, Steinbeck is only an observer and makes a humorous, lovely description of the society. He just recognize the facts, without complain of. The autor himself seem to have accepted life just like it is what is shown in the description of the caracters.

He writes about the failed dreamers, Mack and his boys, who have lost all their goals in live and only want to eat, to drink and to have some fun, and they don’t seem to be very unhappy with their way of living.

He don’t criticize any bad behaviour or acting like Lee Chong’s, who has only an eye to the main chance, or his description of how cruel people can be to each other.

- BOOK PAGES 88+89 (FROG HUNT). The frogs are described as human beings who feel pain, they want to find a new home in a new country. I think this is a description of the second world war wich Steinbeck had experienced as a war correspondent in europe.

- At least the novel is a love declaration to Cannery Row. The town is like an individual, sometimes it goes bad, sometimes better.

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