Examples Of Poverty In Cannery Row By John Steinbeck

A Depiction of Poverty During The Great Depression In the novel Cannery Row, author John Steinbeck exemplifies the lives of people in poverty during the Great Depression. The Great Depression was a time period filled with worldwide economic depression, hopelessness, and unemployment as a result of the stock market crash and multiple recessions. From early 1929 to late 1939, about 30% of the working population was unemployed. With his novel located in the town of Monterey, California, Steinbeck unveils the hardships of the “wealthy” and the “poor” during this decade of despair. Through his characters and their struggles with homelessness, job hunting, suicide, and extreme depression, John Steinbeck paints a picture of rampant poverty through

The jobs they acquire embody the jobs during the Great Depression: mostly spontaneous and remedial, but pay just enough money to keep a person alive. One of the five boys, Eddie, “was an understudy bartender at La Ida” and would pour the leftover alcohol from each drink into a jug and take it back to the Palace Flophouse, the new shack where all the boys now lived. Not only does Steinbeck use Eddie’s actions to show how disgusting the conditions were, but also how desperate people were for anything to drink, especially alcohol. Another one of the boys, Gay, “was an inspired mechanic” who worked on grocery store owner Lee Chong’s truck (p 63). Steinbeck wrote that Gay could have worked in the canneries all the time if he had wanted and in that industry, the machinery is much less important than the fiscal statement (p 63). Moreover, Gay depicts a large percent of the population during the Great Depression, in that those people possessed the skills for certain jobs but little to no jobs were available for them. This issue of no income lead to the suicide of Horace Abbeville, a character in the novel who collected a “debt second to none in Monterey” (pg 7). The characters’ continual unemployment and job search presented by Steinbeck brings to life the prevalent degree of

In Cannery Row, Steinbeck compares and contrasts the positions of the “wealthy” and the poor through different characters, in order to manifest exactly how horrendous the lives of the poor had been. Grocery store owner Lee Chong, a more fortunate and noble man of the town, understands the other characters struggles throughout the novel and “everyone in Cannery Row owed him money” (p 5). He went as far as accepting frogs as money for liquor and food from Mack and the boys (p 123), an extremely radical action. Steinbeck included this situation to vividly describe the intense way of life of the people amid the Great Depression and how everyone did their best to help each other out. Just as the “wealthy” helped the poor, the poor would help the “wealthy” . Lee Chong’s truck had broken down and Gay, the mechanic, fixed it up for him (p 65). Everyone understood the difficulties of the time, and everyone could feel the weight of the unknown on their shoulders. For the purpose of keeping their spirits alive during this melancholy time, the boys did their best to throw a party for Doc and Mary Talbot continuously threw parties for everyone. Steinbeck’s novel and characters display how the only thing people could do was rely on each other to make it through this heinous time