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However, this dismissal of any reasonable importance of Kino and his people only exists when Kino is without wealth, and without his pearl. He not only is self-centered, he respects no value towards the lives and health of natives, almost as if he does not even see them as human beings. This quote all in itself shows the attitude towards natives this man possesses. Even after Coyotito is bit by a scorpion and requires medical attention from the man, he remarks, “Have I nothing better to do than cure insect bites for ‘little Indians’? I am a doctor, not a veterinary” (Steinbeck 11). Kino, seemingly from the start, is in conflict with the doctor. Chiefly amongst the forces of oppression against Kino’s people is the doctor, carrying the general consensus of being a selfish and generally distasteful man. They are the very people that degrade Kino whilst hunting and deceiving him over his pearl. The oppressive forces that contend with Kino’s people, however, are much more than the predators of a seemingly silent nature. There is prey, and this prey is much more than small and big fish and weak mice and valiant hawks. Despite the situations at hand, the immediate peace of what is seen in Kino’s village, there is a dark predator.
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Even as night seems to peacefully and even beautifully fall over the village, little mice hide for their lives in the hunt. And the night mice crept about on the ground and the little night hawks hunted them silently.” (Steinbeck 33) This, too, illustrates the core way in which Steinbeck uses imagery to highlight the oppression of Kino’s people. This point is only further exemplified by another example on the same page, where, “The dampness arose out of the Gulf and was deposited on bushes and cacti and on little trees in salty drops.
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There are hunted, overpowered, and weak just as the little fish are, and just as the bigger fish cause ripples and bring on sounds and sights of distant, seemingly irrelevant chaos, they are the same sounds of hunt, predator and prey that Kino also faces. This is the parallel and predicament that Kino’s own people too face. The big fish are the hunters, the oppressors, and with their deliberate might easily overpower the small fish with seemingly natural discourse. With this, Steinbeck uses elements of sound and sight, with the fishes’ size and their sounds of greater or less prominence, to illustrate a common and core theme in the story. Although the sound may be distant, it is indeed still apparent amongst the villagers as the “slaughter” wages on in the estuary. In chapter three, following the doctor’s malicious encounter with Coyotito as a “patient” after Kino finds the pearl, a scene is described where, “in the estuary a tight-woven school of small fishes glittered and broke water to escape a school of great fishes that drove in to eat them.” The scene then further describes how the smaller fishes made “swishes” as they escaped the more prominent “splash” of the large fish with an apparent aura of distant chaos to the people in their brush houses. Thus, in the novella The Pearl, Steinbeck uses elements such as imagery and symbolism to demonstrate ethnocentric constructs that work against Native Mexicans.Īt the core of the toll of ethnocentric constructs and the oppression of Kino’s native people is the way in which Steinbeck uses imagery to convey the submission and general attitude of Kino’s people concerning the dominating Spaniards.
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But beyond illustrating this story literally, Steinbeck uses different literary elements to convey the complex yet destructive tolls of ethnocentric oppression. This is the story of western civilization and indeed the story depicted in John Steinbeck’s novella The Pearl, with the narrative of Kino and his people set against the oppressive members of his community. Amongst these forces was the power of Spain and this nation’s role in the destruction and hegemony over Native Mexicans the drive for colonial dominance resulted in the downfall and dehumanization of millions. These are the three G’s of European colonization, and the same three G’s that would lead to the destruction of entire civilizations of native people and their forced submission to European ethnic and socioeconomic forces for hundreds of years.