World War II

World War II serves as the immediate historical context for John Steinbeck's composition of The Pearl, a period that deepened his personal disillusionment with American materialism and sharpened his focus on the lives of the marginalized. Steinbeck served as a journalist on the Italian front during the war, living in danger and witnessing the bleak chaos of conflict. This experience, combined with the earlier traumatic reactions to his novel The Grapes of Wrath, led him to interrogate the values he had assumed he shared with most Americans. The war years, along with the death of his marriage, created a time of personal change and apprehension, and these forces directly influenced his creation of the novella's parable of wealth and destruction.

Steinbeck's Wartime Experience and Its Influence

Steinbeck's service as a war journalist on the Italian front exposed him to the brutal realities of conflict, a stark contrast to the idyllic period he had spent in 1940 sailing with Ed Ricketts in the Gulf of California. The war experience, coming after the persecution he faced for writing about the poor in The Grapes of Wrath, contributed to his growing cynicism about systems of power. By 1944–1945, when he wrote The Pearl, he had come to terms with what an obsession with wealth could do to a community and to an individual's identity. The war's violence and the deaths he observed are echoed in the escalating violence of Kino's story, from the killing of a man in the dark to the final, tragic death of his son, Coyotito.

The Search for a Truthful Story Amidst Global Conflict

During the early 1940s, Steinbeck also wrote screenplays, including the documentary The Forgotten Village, about conflicts between modern medicine and superstitious folk cures in a Mexican town. Dissatisfied with American materialism and the pressure to be loyal to a system that oppressed the poor, he focused on the chance to write something truthful. The war years and his own unhappy personal life led him to search for a story suitable for a Mexican-made film, one that might promote understanding among races. The legend of the young Mexican boy who finds a pearl of great value, which Steinbeck had narrated in Sea of Cortez, became the foundation for The Pearl, but he transformed it by making the protagonist a responsible married man with a family, thereby adding a layer of vulnerability that the war had made all too real.

The War's Shadow on the Novella's Themes

The war's influence permeates the novella's themes of systemic oppression and the futility of individual ambition against entrenched power. The collusion of the pearl buyers, who operate as a single syndicate to cheat the fishermen, mirrors the impersonal, destructive forces of war. The doctor's refusal to treat Coyotito because Kino is poor, and his subsequent manipulation to find the pearl, reflects a world where human life is devalued by greed. The trackers who pursue Kino and his family are described as "inland hunters" who can follow a trail like hounds, and their pursuit culminates in a violent confrontation that results in Coyotito's death. This trajectory—from hope to violence to irreparable loss—echoes the war's capacity to destroy innocence and leave only grief. The final image of Kino and Juana returning to La Paz, carrying their dead child, is a stark testament to the war's lesson that the powerful will crush the weak, and that survival often demands the renunciation of one's dreams.