Book Report Activity #3 -- My Reaction
The Pearl
From John Steinbeck's The Pearl, I see that this novel is based upon a Native American legend because Steinbeck's use of "the people say" makes it clear that main characters Kino and Juana are based on a legend. During that time of society, the rich people live separately and dominate the story and poor people. Just like the main character Kino. he felt that the poor can't do anything, because when the time his son had been stung by scorpion, he takes the baby, go looking for doctor, but the doctor was so greed and didn't want to cure the baby because Kino was poor and didn't have money. Although that, I know those poor Native American don't have rights and are considered the lower class people in that time. I think the author was successful in getting the message across, although it is not an easy book to real because the author doesn't tell us everything about the character, the setting and why the characters behave as they do. However, I think that is also a good way to tell a story because it can bring up my imagination and make me think a lot of internal conflict and the things he hoped to have, and those rich people's indirect characterization, but author never told us why, therefore, I said Steinbeck was successful.
The two good points about this novel are that first, the story it told about attracted me a lot, I would like to keep reading it when I just read at the beginning of it, it would let me feel bored. Second, its man point is clear, and really reflect there are some people who can do anything so cruelly. Also that point is not only for that time, for now, I still believe there still has someone who will do the same thing as the trackers and the pearl buyers did for Kino's family. The two bad points are this book is too difficult to read, sometimes it will mess me up, and the thing it talked about won't understand so easily about the main point. However, I think I will like to recommend this book to my friend to read because it is really a good novel, and you will feel totally different format and the way of the author telling the story in that book, also you will see so many things that you might not see before and how those rich people treated the poor people.
This novel mentioned a lot about the direction and indirect characterization, the internal and external conflict between those characters. People's dream and t he way the acting and how can the setting change the mood. When I finished reading the novel, I have seen Kino grow into another person, because the ideas in his mind totally changed when his son died. At the end of the story Kino throwing away the pearl symbolizes he didn't give up by those evil things and determination to live. The themes I realized in Steinbeck's The Pearl are The human spirit can be attacked by the evil in society and the weaknesses within the human personality; Wisdom and knowledge can be gained from a tragic experience; The rich and the powerful usually dominate the poor and uneducated; Goodness and love usually triumph over evil and selfishness; People are usually not satisfied with what they have, they want something more, just like Kino, he didn't always get what he want, but after he tried, he realized that he already got what he needed.
I think I will read more of this author's books, because the book he wrote had many new ideas and let me just get more and more interested in reading them. From this novel, I think that I could learn something from Kino that he had a lot of courage to achieve his goal and never give up, and Juana's love to make her always stand inside of Kino, because their courage had made them still cherish each other at the end. So I like this book, and I also admire it a lot.