“In the town they tell the story of the great pearl ━ how it was found and how it was lost again.”. The Pearl takes place in La Paz, Mexico and begins with the introduction of Kino, his wife Juana and their infant son Coyotito. They live in a modest brush house and have a seemingly ideal family where both understand the other, even without words. One morning, a scorpion crawls down the rope that hangs the box where young Coyotito lays. Both Juana and Kino attempt to move the scorpion away from their son but, their attempts end in vain. Juana holds the baby in her arms and tries sucking the poison out over, and over to no avail. They try to get the doctor to come, knowing how easily a child could die from the poison and knowing already that “He would not …show more content…
The doctor in particular is portrayed less as a person, but more as a symbol of gluttony in The Pearl. Described as a stout and wealthy man, wearing no less than red watered silk imported from Paris, living in a luxurious room and sleeping on a high bed; the doctor seems to eat, sleep and breathe greed. He tends to an old woman “whose illness was age, though neither she nor the doctor would admit it.” . Yet still refused to treat Coyotito’s potentially fatal scorpion bite saying “Have I have nothing better to do than cure insect bites for ‘little Indians’? I am a doctor, not a veterinary.”. Stating that to him, they were less than humans to him, that to him, they were animals. His views on life are that those with wealth are similarly, worth more to him than those without. When the doctor’s servant asks if Kino has the money to pay for Coyotito’s treatment, Kino shows him eight small misshapen seed pearls. He is then dismissed and mislead by the servant that the doctor is not in. Only later when the doctor hears news of their pearl does the doctor come to see their baby, showing his greed as a