cicada

The cicada appears at a single but decisive moment in John Steinbeck's The Pearl, during the night when Kino creeps down the smooth rock face of the mountain cleft to attack the three trackers who have pursued his family. The high metallic ringing of the cicadas fills the mountain cleft, and this sound is not merely background noise but an active element in the narrative's sonic texture. As Kino edges like a slow lizard down the stone, his own music is in his head—the music of the enemy, low and pulsing, nearly asleep. But the Song of the Family has become as fierce and sharp and feline as the snarl of a female puma, alive now and driving him down on the dark enemy. The harsh cicada seems to take up its melody, and the twittering tree frogs call little phrases of it. The cicada's sound thus becomes an extension of Kino's internal struggle, a natural voice that harmonizes with the family song at the moment of lethal action.

Sonic Landscape and Narrative Function

The cicada belongs to a broader system of auditory motifs that Steinbeck uses to replace dialogue and express mood. Throughout the novella, Kino hears the Song of the Family, the Song of Evil, and the Song of the Pearl as internal melodies that guide his perceptions and decisions. The cicada's metallic ringing in the mountain cleft is the only time an actual insect sound is explicitly woven into this musical framework. The harsh cicada does not merely accompany the scene; it seems to take up the melody of the family song, transforming a natural sound into a narrative instrument. This technique reflects Steinbeck's filmic strategy in The Pearl, where music and sound replace verbal meaning, creating a sensory experience that conveys the complexity of Kino's choices without relying on spoken language.

The Cicada in the Context of Pursuit

The moment of the cicada's appearance is the climax of the pursuit sequence. Kino has hidden Juana and Coyotito in a shallow erosion cave thirty feet up the stone shoulder, while the trackers have made camp at the little pool below. The cicada's ringing fills the cleft alongside the tree frogs' twittering, creating a soundscape that both masks Kino's movements and heightens the tension. Kino's mouth is open so that even his breath makes no sound, and he moves so slowly that he will not draw the watcher's eyes. The cicada's sound is part of the night's normal auditory texture, and any sound not germane to the night would alert the watchers. The insect's metallic ringing thus serves as a cover for Kino's approach, a natural alibi for the barely perceptible sounds of his descent. When Kino finally leaps and the gun crashes, the tree frogs and cicadas fall silent, marking the moment when the natural world registers the violence that has occurred.

Thematic Resonance

The cicada's brief but charged appearance reinforces the novella's ecological and moral dimensions. The natural world in The Pearl is not a passive backdrop but an active participant in the drama, from the scorpion that stings Coyotito to the wind that erases tracks to the cicada that sings alongside Kino's battle song. The insect's metallic ringing, harsh and insistent, mirrors the hardness that Kino feels drawing over him as he prepares to meet the attack. It is a sound of the dry, hot desert country, not of the sea where Kino's life began, and its presence marks how far Kino has traveled from the safety of the family song into a landscape of violence and pursuit. The cicada's song, like the pearl itself, is beautiful and terrible, part of a world that offers no easy moral certainties.