The Fool In John Steinbeck's The Pearl

“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”, a quote from alexander pope 's an essay on criticism. Fools often engage in reckless and rash behavior. This can frequently be mistaken for the heroic traits of selfless and courageousness. This is the case in the novel the pearl. Kino plays the fool in John Steinbeck 's The Pearl because Kino blindly trusts the people and things around him, assumes The Pearl itself will solve all of his problems, and does not think his actions through.

In John Steinbeck’s The Pearl, Kino shows us how foolish he is by blindly trusting those around him. This can be notably seen when Kino is observing his wife tending to their baby with seaweed after their failed attempt to go get the doctor. “She (Juana) gathered some brown seaweed and made a flat damp poultice of it, and this she applied to the baby 's shoulder, which was as good a remedy as any and probably better than the doctor could have done.”(Steinbeck 15). Yet later he takes

He blindly trusts that people will not succumb to greed or treat him differently “Kino, so that he became curiously everyman 's enemy...The neighbors looked at the pearl in Kinos hand and they wondered how such luck could come to any man.” (23-24) In this quote we can see how Kino showed everyone in his village the pearl and they all became his enemy in a sense because greed had overtaken them. Kino a man of few words, does not give a thought to how this might affect others and even plans what he is going to do almost bragging in a way about what he is going to do with the money he will get from the pearl. Speaking on the topic of the pearl brings me to yet another example of Kinos blind trust, but this time in the pearl itself. Kino throughout the book is presented with the negative effects from the pearls presents. At one point Kino kills a man just to keep the pearl then punishes his wife for trying to get rid of