Outside Reading Project Blog #3

1) "Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is 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, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses" (1).
Steinbeck uses an incredible amount of detail in his descriptions of setting. He uses very flowery language and situates the scenes very precisely. In Of Mice and Men he uses a lot of description as well, always taking care to capture the feeling and tone of the place. Throughout Cannery Row he relies very heavily on setting and descriptions to tell the story.

2) "When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book -- to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves"(3).
Cannery Row is a story about the area in Monterey where they can sardines and various other fish. There is no real story line; it is more of a series of events. Steinbeck vaguely follows the adventures of a gang of homeless men, "Mack and the boys", along with many other characters. The fact that there is no central theme or main character, it would not be a good story had he written it more like Of Mice and Men. In Of Mice and Men, Lennie and George are constantly busy and are obviously the main characters. Most of the characters in Cannery Row are equally important, and their stories intertwine in a way that separating any of them would cause the story to lose all meaning, like how the worm breaks up if you try to force it onto the blade.

3) " What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals? Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped, poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-the-town, thieves, rascals and bums"(14).
Mack and the boys are the rebels in the book. They are the ones that sit around all day, and really have the best and most relaxing life of all. In Of Mice and Men, everyone works incredibly hard just to earn a small amount of money to live well for the rest of their lives. For example, Candy, the old man still working at the ranch, ruins his life because of all his hard work trying to better his life. Mack and the boys try to beat the system, so instead of working hard they just laze around all day and let the good come to them. Somehow they get a free house from Lee Chong the grocer, and sometimes they make some money collecting specimens for the town biologist, Doc, and for the rest they just have as much fun as they can in life.

4) "Now and then as he watched them he saw them take out a pint of Old Tennis Shoes and wiping the neck of the bottle on a sleeve, raise the pint one after another. And William began to wish he could join that good group"(21).
William was the "watchman" of Dora's brothel, and he desperately wanted to experience a different kind of life. He could see Mack and the boys relaxing and talking about nothing really important from the window of where he worked, and it became something of a fantasy to go chill with them. One day he goes outside to sit on the pipe with them, but they get quiet and stop talking. This is so discouraging to William that he loses the will to live, and he stabs himself in the heart with an icepick. The effects on people when they do not accomplish a dream or a goal in both Of Mice and Men and Cannery Row are always extreme, for example when Lennie screws up his and George's dream, it ends up in his tragic death. It may be seemingly very insignificant dreams, but peoples hopes are the only things that keep them going in difficult times.

5) "There were frogs there all right, thousands of them. Their voices beat the night, they boomed and barked and croaked and rattled. They sang to the stars, to the waning moon, to the waving grasses. They bellowed love songs and challenges" (98).
Mack and the boys decide one day that Doc, the biologist, is such a nice guy that they should throw him a party. However, they don't have any money or alcohol, so they go ask Doc what they can do to make money. He tells them that he will pay them for collecting frogs, so they go to a river a little north from Monterey and here they find a pond with thousands of frogs. Much of the book really just follows Mack and the boys in their adventures and attempts to throw Doc a successful party. The croaking frogs seem to be singing about the suffering of all the people in Of Mice and Men and in Cannery Row and really in society.