The Role Of The Family In John Steinbeck's The Winter Of Our Discontent

John Steinbeck grew up in a booming farming community in Salinas, California; Steinbeck’s father was a manager of a flour mill, and his mother was a former school teacher. He had a comfortable childhood until his teenage years when his father lost his job at the flour mill and opened a feed and grain store that would fail. The Steinbeck family’s finances did not begin to stabilize until John Steinbeck was in college at Stanford University when Steinbeck’s father became the county’s treasurer. John Steinbeck’s own family dynamics have had an impact on the role of family that he establishes for the protagonist in his novel The Winter of Our Discontent. Aspects of Steinbeck’s family background are similar to the protagonist’s, Ethan Hawley, family dynamic; Steinbeck much like Ethan came from an initially stable family until adversity was encountered. The difference between the Steinbeck family and the Hawleys is that the Steinbecks fought

Cristopher Kocela, a critic from The South Atlantic Review, questions Ethan Hawley’s ability to make good morals in the following quotation: “Ambiguity in the terms "good" and "bad" here emphasizes the slippage between moral and economic value that Ethan finds everywhere in his researches into family history (Kocela). Ethan’s emotions cause his morals to be distorted; He is good man, but when his emotional environment tenses, he makes bad decisions that challenge his moral principles. Another critic, Jeffery Schultz, talks more about Ethan’s morals in the following critique of the novel: “He decides to set aside his strict morality to rehabilitate the family fortune (Schultz). Ethan Hawley has high moral standards; he wants to be a honest, honorable man, but his desire to get back his family’s fortune triumphs his morals. This novel is shows that emotions control one’s morals especially when one is desperate to take back the fortune and reputation of their