Early in The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck, a travelling salesman leans across a grocery counter and offers the clerk a kickback on his orders. The clerk says nothing. The salesman, leaving, turns back and delivers the line the whole novel runs on: do not be a fool, everybody does it, everybody.
He is right, and that is the trouble. The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck is set in a small Long Island harbour town where the bank manager, the town manager and the respectable families are all quietly on the take, and where the one man who has stayed honest is poor, employed by an immigrant, and faintly ridiculous to his own children.
In The Winter of Our Discontent, the Voice Is the Design
Ethan Allen Hawley narrates most of The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck himself, and the achievement is tonal rather than structural.
He is funny. He talks to the tinned goods on his own shelves, quotes poetry at his wife before breakfast, calls her ladybug and chicken-flower. The register is light throughout, affectionate and a little performative, the voice of a man who has decided that charm is what he has instead of money.
That voice does not change when the acts do. He reports informing on his employer to the immigration authorities in the same cadence he uses for a joke about Good Friday. He describes handing money to an alcoholic friend with a clear understanding of what it will buy. The prose never raises itself, never signals, never breaks to acknowledge what is happening, and the result is far more disturbing than any amount of anguish would have been.
A group should notice how little self-knowledge the narration actually contains. Ethan never says he has done something wrong. He arranges circumstances, observes outcomes, and keeps talking.
Danny Taylor Is the Test Case of The Winter of Our Discontent
Of the two major betrayals, the one worth an evening is the quieter one.
Danny is the town drunk, from a family as old as Ethan’s and an education as good, ruined by something at the Academy that nobody in New Baytown will specify. He also happens to own a worthless-looking meadow outside town that will be worth a great deal once an airport is approved.
Ethan gives him money for a cure. Both men know precisely what the money is for, and the novel declines to spell it out because neither of them needs it spelled out. Danny signs anyway. He is not deceived; he is simply past minding.
That is the hardest scene in The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck, and it is hard because the victim consents, with full information, out of exhaustion. A reading group that wants to argue about complicity will find more in those four pages than in the rest of the novel.
Objections Worth Raising About The Winter of Our Discontent
Steinbeck was sixty when he wrote this, and the machinery occasionally shows:
- Margie Young-Hunt reads fortunes, predicts the plot, and exists mainly to say the themes out loud. The book is better in the chapters she is absent from.
- The symbol-making is relentless. A family relic kept behind glass, the action opening on Good Friday, a boy taking a prize for an essay he copied.
- That son’s subplot resolves on schedule and reads as argument rather than event.
- The final chapter turns on a coincidence, and readers who call it contrived have a case.
What the Town Is For
The town in The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck is more carefully built than it
first appears, and a group that treats New Baytown as backdrop will miss half the argument.
Nobody in it is dramatically wicked. The bank manager is pleasant. The town manager is efficient.
Ethan’s wife wants a better life and says so without malice. His children want money and are
embarrassed by a father who has none. The corruption is ambient, procedural and entirely polite,
conducted by people who would be baffled to be called corrupt.
That matters because it removes the usual excuse. Ethan is not pushed into anything by a villain.
He simply works out, over about ninety pages, that the honest position he has been occupying is
one that nobody around him respects, including his own family, and that stepping out of it
requires no confrontation at all. He has only to stop declining.
Steinbeck is writing about post-war American prosperity and what it did to small-town ethics,
which is a long way from the migrant camps and the Dust Bowl. The anger is still there. It has
simply been pointed somewhere unfamiliar, at comfortable people rather than the systems that
crushed them.
The Nobel Shadow
This appeared in 1961. The following year Steinbeck took the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the American reaction was unusually hostile, with critics arguing the award was twenty years late and the recent work did not support it. Asked directly whether he deserved it, he said he did not.
The novel has been read through that argument ever since, which does it no favours. Taken on its own, The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck is tighter than the Monterey books, harder than anything since the 1930s, and the only thing he wrote about money rather than the lack of it. Groups that know him from the Dust Bowl novels should expect a different writer.
For contrast, our analysis of East of Eden covers the other late novel preoccupied with whether a man can choose his own conduct, and Cannery Row makes exactly the opposite case about money, fifteen years earlier and far more cheerfully. Tortilla Flat is where that argument starts.
Questions for the Table
- Ethan never admits wrongdoing in his own narration. Does he know?
- Danny consents to his own destruction. Does that reduce what Ethan has done?
- The title comes from Richard III, who announces he will be a villain. Is Ethan that self-aware?
- Is the ending a rescue, a reprieve, or an evasion?
- Does a novel about corruption need to punish anyone?
What It Leaves Behind
The last pages put Ethan in the water at night with a packet of razor blades in his raincoat, intending not to come back. What stops him is his daughter, who had thrown herself at him in the hallway an hour earlier, clutching at him and running her hands over his pockets while he worried she might find the blades. She was putting something in, not taking something out: the old family relic, put there to keep a light from going out.
It is an image that works and a plot mechanism that does not quite. Ellen saves her father by accident of affection, and a novel this unsparing about adult self-deception finishes by handing its protagonist a reprieve he has done nothing to earn.
Whether that is mercy or failure of nerve is the argument The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck leaves on the table, and it is a good one to end an evening on.