The Quality of Cannery Row's Light-Review

Honors English
8 September 2010
The Quality of Cannery Row's Light
John Steinbeck's Cannery Row is a compilation of many stories along with a reoccurring story line. Steinbeck aims to reveal Cannery Row throughout his many narratives and keeps an underlying theme of small community unification. The best description of Cannery Row is given in the first two sentences of the book, “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.” This novel is indeed a quality of light, one of the most impossible things to achieve in literature. When an author achieves this “quality of light” the story pops, it sparkles, and it shines into action with its expressive tones and shades. Cannery Row gives the seeming essence of light and dark, especially finishing the book with a crescendo of quoting "Black Marigold," a translated Sanskrit experiment, such an excerpt gives way to that quality of light in that message Cannery Row feels the storm swell, rise, and finally cease. The conclusion sheds light on the fact that sometimes things change and other times they remain the same.
The initial problem I ran into with reading Cannery Row was Steinbeck's off topic stories. At first I found them utterly confounding, then after further analysis, the stories reveled themselves as background information that let the reader understand the context Cannery Row was taken from. The many rants and winding raves are simply descriptive information. They can finally be taken for relevant information in the end of the story. The side stories range from a solitary Chinaman, to finding a dead man's liver and intestines left with a boy and his dog, and back to Beer Milkshakes. In this sense Cannery Row has an appeal for anyone with a mind can keep everything in a straight order or has a many tracked mind. From the bouncing back and forth to the endless descriptions that detail the characters Cannery Row is a great read.