Analysis of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 9, 2026

Several critics have suggested that Cannery Row grew out of Steinbeck’s disgust for the battlefield during his assignment as a war correspondent in Germany and his desire to escape to something light and cheerful. Steinbeck affirmed this in various letters, describing the novel as a “funny little book that is fun and pretty nice.” The novel recreates a nostalgic and sentimental past, when life was simple and easy (and, for the author, a time when the dissatisfaction and malaise brought about by success and fame were not factors in his life).

Cannery Row has been called Steinbeck’s most perfectly realized novel based on his concept of non-teleological “is” thinking. This philosophy, developed by Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts during their 1940 collecting voyage on their boat, The Western Flyer, involves the acceptance of whatever exists in the natural world. Questions of why or how movements occur are of no importance. Rather, individuals using critical thinking are careful to avoid imposing any prior values or systems in evaluating the world around them. Pure in heart, they strive for objectivity: to understand that whatever “is” is right. Such objectivity, of course, is neither simple nor easy to achieve. It requires a spontaneous painlessness that is often contrary to human nature.

Cannery Row is the record of Steinbeck’s search for the truth, for the principle that can tie humanity to the pattern of all life and the relation of one person to another. In Cannery Row, the drowned girl found during Doc’s exploration of the tidal flat exemplifies this unity. After the find, Doc hears cosmic music, the music of the spheres. The vision implies great beauty and even ecstasy, although it is simultaneously appalling and fearful. In this vision of death, the purposiveness of events is shown to be irrelevant; there can be no answers—only pictures that become larger and more significant as one’s horizon increases.

The novel has often been labeled an “essay in loneliness” and “a poisoned creampuff,” which suggests pain rather than pleasure. The text reveals that the opinion of the world without is often too simplistic, and the novel counters with the world within, the internal resources that mirror life’s complexity. The outside world imposes societal values on individuals. Respectability, progress, possessions, and responsibility all imply some sort of regulation that controls men and women, and Steinbeck acknowledges that those who withdraw from such control of their lives are labeled as eccentric or weird, like Mack and the boys in the novel.

Cannery Row, therefore, is not a simple book that advocates a bohemian, laid-back, free style similar to the Beat generation that followed soon in the early 1950s. Its complexity reveals the positives and the negatives caused by the duality of human beings, and it is designed to help readers recognize that life itself is many-faceted. One has to be open to new worlds to replace the world that is continually in the process of self-destruction. Often Steinbeck portrays the pain as overwhelming, resulting in self-destruction. In fact, suicides are recurrent events on the Row: Horace Abbeville shoots himself when he loses his property over a grocery debt; William, the bouncer at Dora’s, stabs himself with an ice pick; the drowned girl on the reef seems to have ended her own life; and the young boy Joey’s father has eaten rat poison in despair when he loses his job. None can escape depression so easily.

One of Steinbeck’s aims in Cannery Row certainly seems to be urging intellectual beings to come away from the rush and the demands of the city and discover true peace. Maintaining this simple life, however, is not easy. Even members of the Row are unable to consistently persevere in their rejection of societal values. For example, Mack and the boys are compelled to dress up the Palace Flophouse, the Malloys seek curtains for their home in a boiler that has no windows, and Frankie thinks an expensive gift is necessary in order to express his love. Consequently, any simplistic reading of the novel as advocating one lifestyle over another must be dismissed as wholly inadequate.

Moreover, the orderliness of the captain’s wife in chapter 15 has created a world of hell for her husband. The rigid moral codes of Monterey citizens have condemned the Bear Flag brothel without realizing what Dora and her girls have done for the community. Ultimately, the reader is forced to conclude that the only solution is to strive to be the most perfect human one can in an imperfect universe.

Aside from non-teleological thinking and the simple lifestyle, most critics suggest that Cannery Row can best be seen as an allegory, displaying the universal tendencies of humans in the worlds that the setting microcosmically represents. The waves and the tide pools seem to function symbolically, echoing natural rhythms of life and at the same time suggesting the chaotic swirl of existence with its eddies, vortexes, and still waters. The free flux demonstrated by the pool prefigures the patchwork of time that Steinbeck utilizes throughout his work. This sense of timelessness is suggested both by the frequent insertion of anachronisms and also by lack of chronological patterns in the text.

Steinbeck’s repetitious use of parties in his novels is also deserving of attention. Although most critics center on two parties given for Doc, the novel contains many other celebrations. Mack and the boys’ informal cookout before the frog hunt and the party given by the captain in chapter 14 also are quite spontaneous and congenial, indicating the value of the camaraderie and interrelationships that such celebrations symbolize. The party of the two soldiers and their prostitutes and those parties given by Mary Talbot for the stray cats and her husband, Tom, are examples of such successful uninhibited expressions of joy and celebration. Similarly, Mary’s parties in chapter 24 bring excitement and a special glow to herself and others. As Steinbeck’s narrator notes, the parties “covered and concealed the fact that she didn’t have very nice clothes and [that] the Talbots didn’t have any money” (152). The final party, which ends the novel, brings more individuals into the celebration. Lonely human beings, sometimes despondent and set apart, find salvation in the festivity provided by such infectious merrymaking.

Finally, the Daodejing (Tao Teh Ching) of Laozi (Lao Tze), a Chinese philosopher of the sixth century B.C., is also a significant source of the philosophy advocated in Cannery Row. Developed in detail by Peter Lisca in his book John Steinbeck: Nature and Myth, the parallels between the Tao and Cannery Row are striking. Both were written during a time of brutal war and presented a system of values that was opposed to the qualities that had caused the war. For example, Taoism rejects holding fixed and strong opinions because they usually lead to violence. In this faith, the moral life is one of inaction, and there can be success in failure. Believers hold to the right of individuals to cultivate simple physical enjoyments and the inner life.

The novel contains several echoes of the Tao. Doc becomes the symbolic Taoist sage who adheres to the following Taoist principles: (1) by not believing people, you turn them into liars; (2) by analyzing all life, you can assure that there is no useless person; and (3) by looking at nature you can come to know yourself. In contrast to the tenets of the Tao is the evil that men bring upon themselves through greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest. Lisca concludes that Cannery Row has twin themes: an escape from both Western materialism and Western activism. Material success and rigid order and direction are rejected as the ultimate evidence of personal achievement. The passivity of Eastern philosophy, also stressed in East of Eden, is revealed as more valuable than the Western emphasis on acquisitiveness and aggression. One also thinks back to Steinbeck’s American heritage: the independence and self-reliance valued by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the isolation and contemplation practiced by Henry David Thoreau.

In conclusion, accommodation and transformation seem to be goals of Cannery Row. Although love is portrayed as fragile and risky, there is no better way to become completely human and to see wholeness momentarily. Doc, the detached lonely observer of the good life, is pulled into the human commune by Mack and the boys, but as the insightful sage, he recognizes that pleasure is fleeting and that life is consistently a mixture of good and evil. The book’s conclusion with Doc’s paradoxical joy and sorrow is therefore appropriate to the reality of weltschmerz (world sorrow). The individual who is truly in tune with his or her inner self acknowledges his or her own duality and the inevitability of a life intermixed with positives and negatives.

SOURCES

Astro, Richard, and Tetsumaro Hayashi, eds. Steinbeck: The Man and His Work. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1971.

Benson, Jackson L. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography. New York: Viking, 1984.

French, Warren. John Steinbeck’s Fiction Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1994.

Hayashi, Tetsumaro, ed. John Steinbeck: The Years of Greatness, 1936–1939. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993.

Hayashi, Tetsumaro. A New Study Guide to Steinbeck’s Major Works, with Critical Explications. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1993.

Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

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Hedgpeth, Joel W. “Philosophy on Cannery Row.” In Steinbeck: The Man and His Work, edited by Richard Astro and Tetsumaro Hayashi, 89–129. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1971.