Cannery Row Character Analysis

Minor characters in novels play an important role in highlighting certain themes or influencing the development of a main character. The subtle and indirect effect of these characters throughout a story often provides a final takeaway that is layered and profound. In his novel Cannery Row, John Steinbeck uses minor characters to track the emotional development of Doc, whose full transformation is achieved in the final chapters of the book at a town-wide party for his birthday (maybe tweak thesis after done with bodies). Doc’s unwillingness to emotionally reciprocate in his relationship with Frankie introduces his initial struggles of expression and marks the starting point for his maturation throughout the story. Frankie, a troubled young …show more content…
After a day spent capturing octopi, Doc stumbles upon a dead girl whose “face looked up at him, a pretty pale girl with dark hair” (105). The way that death is lightly dealt with on Cannery Row, would predict an apathetic response from Doc, but its effect on Doc causes the reader to wonder. The image of the girl’s eyes “open and clear” and the hair “washing gently about her head” stuck in Doc’s head until his “heart pounded deeply and his throat felt tight” (105). Doc’s emotions were stirred so greatly by this seemingly minor encounter that “music sounded in [his] ears [...] he shivered and his eyes were wet the way they get in the focus of great beauty” (105). On the surface, the vague description of tears highlights Doc’s modest expression of emotion and his hesitance to cry, but the girl’s ability to bring Doc to tears for the first time in the novel actually speaks to his intense emotional reaction, subtly brings the the reader back to Doc’s “love trouble” at the University of Chicago (99), which would suggest that perhaps the body of the dead girl reminds Doc of a lost love from the past. This love trouble is brought back once again in the town-wide party celebrating Doc’s birthday. After Doc plays “Ardo and the Armor from an album of Monteverdi” (174) for the guests—finally expressing the music similar to the tune that plays in his head at the site of the dead girl—he reads a poem that moves the members of Cannery Row. The poem discusses a girl “with lotus eyes” and the speaker describes his own “eyes that hurry to see no more are painting, painting / Faces of my lost girl” (175). The picture of the dead girl’s face and eyes are brought up by this poem, strengthening the theory that the girl beneath the water, indelible in Doc’s mind, represents a