Most summaries of The Pearl by John Steinbeck describe a poor fisherman destroyed by greed. That reading survives about as long as it takes to reach the buyers’ offices, where Steinbeck slips in the sentence that reorganises the whole book: there are not really many buyers at all, there is only one, and he keeps his agents in separate rooms to give a semblance of competition. This analysis covers the whole novella, including the ending.
Kino is not ruined by wanting too much. He is ruined by a market built so that people like him cannot sell.
Every Institution in The Pearl by John Steinbeck Is Already Closed
Count the doors Kino knocks on and what happens at each.
The doctor will not come out to a brush house for a scorpion sting, because the family has no money, and he says as much through a servant without troubling to appear. Within hours of the news he is at Kino’s door, where he administers something that makes the recovering baby violently ill and then returns to cure it, so that the cure is his. He then asks where the pearl is kept, and watches Kino’s eyes move to the corner.
The priest hears the news while walking in his garden. His first recorded thought concerns repairs the church requires. His second is to wonder whether he baptised the baby. He arrives later to remind Kino of his duty to give thanks to the one who provided the treasure.
The buyers perform a routine. One rolls a coin across his knuckles, examines the pearl, calls it a curiosity too large to sell, and offers a thousand pesos. His colleagues, summoned to confirm, agree it is worthless or offer slightly more. They are employees of the same man.
Three institutions, three refusals, and the same structure under each: Kino may be extracted from
but never transacted with.
The buyers’ scene repays a slow reading, because it is the one place where the book shows the machinery rather than the result. The agent has a coin that he rolls back and forth across his knuckles throughout, a small performance of ease while he tells a man his life’s luck is a curiosity nobody wants. Kino can tell he is lying. He cannot prove it, he has nowhere else to take the pearl except the distant capital, and both of them know it. The scene works because nothing in it is illegal. The arrangement does not need to break any rule to leave him with nothing.
Juana Understands The Pearl First
She reaches the correct conclusion on the second night, and she is never wrong again. The Pearl by John Steinbeck is evil, she says, it will destroy them, and it should go back into the sea.
Kino’s answer is that this is their one chance, and that Coyotito will go to school. He is not being stupid, and the novella respects the reasoning. A literate Coyotito would mean no more relying on strangers to say truthfully what is written on a document, and that dependence is the exact hinge the whole arrangement turns on. Both of them are right. She is right about the pearl, he is right about the trap.
What makes it unbearable is that she acts on her judgement and he stops her. She rises before dawn, carries the pearl to the shore, and raises her arm to throw it. He catches her wrist, strikes her in the face, and kicks her in the side while she lies among the stones.
A group should sit with that scene rather than moving past it. It is the only act of violence Kino commits against someone who has done him no harm, it is committed against the one person who has been right throughout, and the novella does not condemn it in its own voice. She gets up, picks her way back up the beach, and follows him. Steinbeck gives her no line of protest at all.
Reading Juana as the Novella’s Intelligence
She is described almost entirely through what she does rather than what she says, and the list is formidable.
She sucks the scorpion poison from the baby’s shoulder before anyone suggests it. And she is the one who proposes fetching the doctor, which nobody in the brush houses has ever dared ask for. She makes a poultice of seaweed when the doctor refuses, and the narration notes it is probably better medicine than he would have supplied, though it carries less authority because she made it. When Kino kills a man in the dark, she does not argue about guilt; she says they must go, immediately, and starts packing.
Her mistake, if it is one, is loyalty. She knows what the pearl will do and she follows him into the mountains anyway, carrying the child who is shot there.
For a meeting, the sharpest question in The Pearl is whether John Steinbeck knows what he has built. He has written a woman who is right about everything, who is beaten for being right, and who is given almost no interiority while her husband gets an entire private soundtrack of songs. Either the novella is quietly demonstrating whose judgement a community ignores, or it is enacting the same dismissal it is describing.
Questions Worth Bringing to a Meeting
- Juana is right from the second night. Why does the book give her so few words?
- Kino wants his son to learn to read so the family cannot be cheated. Is that greed?
- The doctor, the priest and the buyers all refuse him. Which refusal is the most damaging?
- Does the beating on the beach change how you read everything Kino does afterwards?
- The last two words of the novella are Juana’s. What is she refusing?
- Juan Tomas, Kino’s brother, shelters them and then warns him off. Is that cowardice or sense?
- If the pearl had sold for a fair price, would the town have let the family keep the money?
What The Pearl Takes, and in What Order
The losses arrive in a deliberate sequence, and a group that tracks them will see the argument the plot is making.
First the help is withheld. Then the market closes. Then the canoe, inherited from his grandfather, is holed, which removes his ability to work or to leave by water. And then the brush house burns. Then a man attacks him in the dark and Kino kills him, which turns him from a victim into a fugitive. Then the trackers follow them into the mountains, and a rifle shot fired at a noise in a cave kills the baby.
Every stage is caused by the pearl and carried out by other people. The novella is often taught as though the object were cursed. What actually happens is that a community learns a poor man is holding something valuable, and dismantles him for it over six chapters.
The Songs Belong to Kino Alone
One formal detail is worth raising at a meeting because it decides how the book feels.
Kino hears music. John Steinbeck gives him a Song of the Family for the ordinary morning, a Song of Evil when the scorpion appears, and a Song of the Pearl That Might Be out in the canoe. The reader is told at every point which melody is playing, so Kino’s inner weather is always available without a word of introspection.
Juana has no songs. She is permitted to hear the family melody once, singing it aloud against the dark music to keep the evil away from the baby, and the narration describes her voice as brave. Beyond that, the reader is outside her completely. We learn what she does and almost never what she feels.
This is a defensible choice for a tale told in a town, where the fisherman is the one the story is about. It also means that the character who is right about everything is the character we are never allowed inside. Kino gets the interior life and the bad judgement; Juana gets the good judgement and no interior at all.
Decide as a group whether that is the novella’s quiet point or its failure. The strongest case for Steinbeck is that the gap is exactly the one the community imposes: nobody in the town asks Juana anything either. The strongest case against is that he had ninety pages and could have given her ten lines.
The Setting Is Not Incidental
The town has two halves: brush houses by the shore, and a town of stone and plaster where the doctor, the priest and the buyers live. Kino belongs to the first and must go into the second to do anything at all, and the novella is precise about what happens to him when he does.
Steinbeck heard the story in 1940 at La Paz, in Baja California, while travelling the Gulf with the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, and wrote it down then as a local anecdote. He turned it into a novella in the mid-1940s and published it in 1947. The arrangement he describes, a native population serviced by a European professional class and a single buyer with a monopoly, is colonial in structure and he does not soften it.
It is worth saying that the book has been criticised for this too, on the grounds that a white American novelist is retelling an indigenous story and flattening its people into a parable. The frame answers that charge halfway by admitting the flattening up front. Whether halfway is enough is a reasonable thing for a group to disagree about.
How The Pearl Ends, in Two Words
Groups that want to push further on method will find our step-by-step guide to writing a literary analysis useful, and The Little Prince is the other short book on this site that rewards being read as a parable rather than a story.
Kino and Juana walk back through the stone town side by side, past the burned square and the broken canoe, and the neighbours stand aside. She carries the dead child in a shawl over her shoulder.
At the water Kino takes out the pearl. The surface has gone grey and sick-looking, and images move in it: fire, the panicked face of the man who died in the pool, and his son as he was found in the cave. Then he offers it across to his wife, so that the throw can be hers.
She looks at it, looks at him, and says “No, you.”
She has wanted this since the second night. And she tried it herself and was beaten for it. She could take the satisfaction now and she refuses, and in doing so refuses one last time to carry something on his behalf. The Pearl by John Steinbeck does not end on a lesson about wealth. It ends with a woman who was right all along declining to clean up after a man who was wrong, and letting him do it himself while she stands beside him holding their son.
Read in the Penguin edition, which opens with an essay by Linda Wagner-Martin; nothing here draws on it. Viking published the book in 1947, two years after the magazine version titled “The Pearl of the World”.