In high school I read Of Mice and Men, which I liked quite a lot but found more than a little disturbing. More recently I finally got around to reading The Grapes of Wrath which was amazing except for a few small parts that really bothered me. No, not the ending, even though that was 9 different kinds of fucked up.
I don’t do well with books where animals are killed or tortured and so far Steinbeck seems to be very into hurting animals to make a literary point. I didn’t even like that Tom Joad picked up the turtle and took it with him as a present to the kids quite frankly. It struck me as odd and cruel to wrap up a turtle in a jacket and carry it that way for hours with no food or water. The animal issues proceeded to get significantly worse from there.
I don’t mind when animals are killed for food or clothing or whatever in a book. Slaughtering a pig or something I can sort of skip through and understand why it was included, but for heaven’s sake why did he have to go into such detail about the dog getting hit by a car? Or the various drivers aiming to hit feral animals with their cars on the way to CA?
Is this pretty standard for Steinbeck? I’d like to go on and read East of Eden as I understand that is supposed to be one of his best but I’m not up for several more instances of animal torture.
I have heard that you should DEFINITELY skip The Red Pony. I have a hard time with animals dying so I haven’t read it either. I love him otherwise - don’t miss East of Eden.
Probably a good idea to take a pass on “The Red Pony.”
John Steinbeck’s one of my all-time favorite authors, btw, and East of Eden one of my all time favorite books. Been years and years and years since I’ve read it, though. I don’t recall any overt animal cruelty in it, but they might have just been overshadowed by all the human cruelty in the book. Still, I don’t think anything else I’ve ever read has had such a formative impact on me. I do not think I’d be exactly the person I am today, if I hadn’t read that book when I read it.
East of Eden is a great novel – as in, A Great American Novel – but, like Miller, I read it too long ago to be able to guarantee no animal cruelty in it.
It must be some sort of scholastic convention to expose youngsters to “The Red Pony” at about that age. Wonder if it’s still required in elementary or middle school literature or if the PC educators have done away with it. It was required reading for me about the same time. As i recall, it was a very uncomfortable read. I’ve never read it again, but it must have made an impression because I can still recall parts of it forty-odd years after the fact…especially the part where the boy stalks the buzzards that are eating his dead horse; captures and kills one bare-handed. There are some lines there about the black vomit spewing from the bird’s beak…that gave me the willies for a long time after.
Maybe it’s that harsh and absolute realism that makes Steinbeck’s stories so memorable. How many people know, after all, that buzzards really do regurgitate when under sudden stress…some sort of defensive mechanism I think, after all, having a buzzard puke on you would probably make you inclined to let it go.
I loved “Cannery Row”, probably because I read it when I was a young man, footloose, shiftless and mostly broke, just like the characters in the story.
I think John Steinbeck is truely one of the greats among American authors, far superior IMHO to Hemingway who is usually considered the master writer of that era. His stories are not happy stories, no fluff or feel-good there, but as someone pointed out up-thread they do tend to draw a reader in and keep one coming back for more. “Travels with Charley” is an exception - it is mostly about pleasant things, but then Steinbeck was an old man when he wrote that one and probably mellowing a bit.
I think his classic short story “Flight” which most people seem to have forgotten, is a real masterpiece of that genre (Found an online copy here if anyone’s interested).
Don’t Ask was excessively insulting, but I take his point.
To a large extent, John Steinbeck was writing rough books about rough people going through rough times. Homeless migrant Okies, underemployed California cannery workers, and impoverished drifters are hard men, world-weary men. They use crude language and sometimes do thoughtlessly cruel things.
That CAN be unpleasant to read about, I grant you. I understand if you find it disturbing to read, and would rather read something cheerier. But Steinbeck would be doing his readers a disservice if he sanitized the cannery workers’ language, turned Lenny Small into a harmless oaf, or made the Okies completely likeable.
Face it- a farmer in Oklahoma doesn’t sentimentalize possums or deer or bunny rabbits the way you or I might- he regards them as thieving, destructive pests. He’ll shoot them if he sees them. Even AFTER he’s lost his farm, he probably STILL regards them as no-good varmints thayt need killing.
Or, perhaps, after a hopeless, homeless man has been driving for hours and days along a desolate road, he might just get some grim pleasure out of running over an animal. That’s mean and cruel, but it’s also human and it’s true to life.
Right, which is why I mentioned nothing about toning down language, making Lennie harmless, or making Okies likeable. Those things are all important parts of the story. Reading about how a beloved family pet was crushed by a passing car and left with its intestines oozing all over the road while the children looked on added nothing to the story except an additional moment of loss. That moment of loss could have been done in the same way as the rest of the dogs mentioned where they simply weren’t brought along on the trip. The rabbit being cooked or the pig being slaughtered weren’t problematic, the drivers swerving in hopes of running over snakes or cats added nothing but disgust to the story.
And the farmer killing off vermin is again not what I am talking about here. Is a hopeless, homeless man killing animals for pleasure human and true to life? Probably. Did it add anything important to the story? Not in my opinion. Wiping your ass is part of human nature too but we didn’t get several descriptions of ass wiping in the book and it was no worse a story with the lack of ass wiping. The same would have been true of the animal cruelty.
But that’s Steinbeck’s decision. If he had thought it was necessary to the story, he would have written about wiping your ass.
Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has an extended, disgusting reflection on sewers, and how we all live on top of vast highway networks of shit.
I’m not saying Grapes of Wrath would be significantly worse without the parts that are bothering you, pbbth, but this is coming off as a very easy avenue for criticism. Of course the animal deaths are not critical to the story. They contribute in a small way to the atmosphere and those kinds of small things contribute to the feeling of the book. Your reaction is evidence that they do that, I think. It’s easy to say he could have done this differently - much easier than actually writing the book and using the details that way. Then again I’ve never been as bothered by animal deaths in books as some Dopers are.