Cannery Row Dbq

Cannery Row a short novel of less than 200 pages first published in 1945 paints you a very clear picture of what life was back in those days. The book is a profound reflection of the American dream in Monterey California; all it takes to perfectly picture the tone, grit, and color of the town is the first paragraph. “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the 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. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and …show more content…
But it also is a reflection of the imperfection if human beings and darker side of life, like poverty and death; by the end of the first chapters we already have some suicides, Doc finds a dead girl on the beach etc. Because all the stories happen in the same neighborhood the book gives you a sense of community, no matter how different the characters seem to be, for example Doc is a marine biologist, Mack and the boys are just a group of bums, Lee Chong is the owner of a grocery store where you can buy almost everything, and Dora is the owner of a brothel. As the chapters unravel as you read you start to have an understanding of the characters in this little community; Lee Chong is shown to be hard headed but at the same time kind hearted, Mack and the boys are described by the book as ideals, even though they don’t have much they seem to live life in peace and free of the worries of modern