The Pearl Finn Steinbeck Analysis

“Light” is a big part of the story. It shows how the brightness of something can change a man into thinking something he usually doesn’t. One day when Kino was diving for pearls he got a pearl that he knows was special. Kino opens the pearl and there lays a “Pearl of the World”. The pearl “capture[s] the light and refine[s] it and [gives] it back in silver incandescence” (Steinbeck 19). Kino treasures the pearl because he wants to be as rich as a white man. That is how the pearl practically captures him and turns him into a different man. However even though Kino loves the pearl and how it glows, he starts to realize that it might change him. While Kino and Juana were looking at the pearl “The incandescence of [it,] the pictures [form] of the things that Kino’s mind [has] considered in the past and had given up as impossible” (24). This hints that Kino’s mind has can’t even picture the past …show more content…
He wants to protect the pearl and he will hurt anyone who tries to take or destroy it. One night Juana tries to take the pearl and throw is back into the ocean. Kino catches her doing this and beat her while other men watched. Kino chases one of the men and murders him. Juana “[knows] there [is] murder in him, and it [is] all right; she [has] accepted it, and she would not resist or even protest” (59). Juana knows that the pearl is changing Kino, but doesn’t want to get in the way. He loves his wife but the pearl continues to change him. Kino is described as a changing animal. While he and his family were hid out in the mountains, they spotted two trackers trying to find them. Kino snuck up behind them and “[Edges] like a slow lizard down the smooth rock shoulder” (84). He usually would not sneak up on someone and kill someone. But because he changed into a killing monster he would do such a thing. All of Kino’s changing eventually lead up to his baby sons death which put him and his wife into