The Pearl

Paper Summary:

The writer of this paper provides a brief summary of the plot of the story and examines the characters in the context of the theme "good versus evil". It focuses on the characters of the doctor, the priest and the beggars in the story, and how they react to the finding of the pearl by Kino. The pearl represents all things good, as seen by Kino and his life of poverty is bad. This all changes as the story progresses.

From the Paper:

"The Pearl is a short novel or a parable by the famous Nobel Prize winning American author, John Steinbeck. It was first published in 1945. Critics as well as ordinary readers over the years have examined John Steinbeck's writings from different angleseach having found divergent meanings in them. This is probably due to the underlying paradox in Steinbeck's writings, The Pearl being no exception. In The Pearl Steinbeck tells the story of a poor Mexican-Indian fisherman (Kino) who finds a very large pearl ("The Pearl of the World") that is apparently Kino's ticket of deliverance from his life of abject poverty and deprivation, but which actually brings him even greater harm. One of the morals of the story is the virtue in the poor man's struggle against the forces of injustice and exploitation. The paradox is the apparent futility of the struggle."

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