The Pearl

Summary

The Pearl is a short novella in six chapters, framed as a folk tale retold in the Gulf town of La Paz, on the coast of Baja California. Kino, a poor pearl diver, lives in a brush house by the shore with his wife, Juana, and their infant son, Coyotito. One morning a scorpion stings the baby. Juana sucks the wound, and the family, followed by curious neighbors, carries Coyotito to the town's doctor, a foreigner who despises Kino's people; told through his servant that Kino has no money, the doctor refuses to come out. Kino and Juana paddle out in the canoe Kino inherited from his father and grandfather, and while Juana prays and puts a seaweed poultice on the swelling, Kino dives and brings up an enormous pearl, the Pearl of the World. News spreads at once. Kino dreams aloud of a church wedding, new clothes, a harpoon, a rifle, and school for Coyotito so that he can read and be free. The priest calls to remind him to give thanks, and the doctor now arrives eagerly, gives the recovering child a white powder that makes him sick within the hour, and then treats the sickness, while watching to see where the pearl is hidden. That night an intruder attacks Kino in the dark. In the morning the pearl buyers of La Paz, who all work for one hidden master, pretend the pearl is a clumsy curiosity and offer a thousand pesos. Kino refuses and resolves to sell it in the capital, against the warnings of his brother, Juan Tomás. In the night Juana tries to throw the pearl into the sea; Kino catches and strikes her, and moments later he is ambushed and kills a man. Their canoe is holed and their house burned, so after hiding a day with Juan Tomás and Apolonia, the family flees north on foot. Two trackers and a horseman with a rifle follow them into the mountains. At a pool below a cliff, Kino creeps down at night to attack; Coyotito cries, the rifleman fires at the sound, and Kino kills all three men, but the shot has killed the baby. Kino and Juana walk back into La Paz side by side, Juana carrying the dead child, and Kino throws the pearl into the Gulf. Steinbeck first heard the story in La Paz in 1940 and recorded it in Sea of Cortez (1941); a version titled The Pearl of the World appeared in Woman's Home Companion in December 1945, and Viking published the book in 1947, the year of the Mexican film La Perla.

Top Lessons

• Wealth that owns its owner

  Kino believes the pearl will make him free, but from the moment he finds it the pearl rules his days, his sleep and his family. Steinbeck shows how a treasure can turn a man from provider into prisoner.

• The powerful prey on the poor

  The doctor, the pearl buyers and the hidden thieves all treat Kino as something to be used. The book asks what a poor man can do when every route to a better life is controlled by others.

• Pride and its price

  Kino calls himself a man and will not be cheated, and that resolve leads him to strike his wife, kill, and lose his son. The story honors his courage while showing how quickly it turns to violence.

• A story told as a parable

  Steinbeck presents the tale as one the townspeople retell, with clear good and evil and no in-between. Reading it as a parable means asking what each part stands for and what it says about the reader's own life.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The novella opens with a medical emergency and a refusal of care. A scorpion stings an infant; his mother sucks the wound, and the town's only doctor, who will not treat a poor Indian family without payment, turns them away. Juana's brown seaweed poultice is folk medicine, and by the time Kino surfaces with the pearl the swelling is going down. After the pearl is found the doctor returns, tells the parents the poison may have gone inward, gives the recovering child a white powder in a capsule, and then treats the sickness that follows; the narrative strongly implies that he induced the illness to make himself necessary. For a medical reader the book is a compact study of access to care across race and class, of the physician as exploiter of people he regards as beneath him, and of a doctor's trust abused. The death of Coyotito and Juana's silent carrying of his body home close the book in grief. Clinical readings of the scorpion sting and of what the powder might have been are the reader's own; Steinbeck names no drug.

• Chapter 1

  The scorpion stings Coyotito; Juana sucks the puncture; the family goes to the doctor's gate and is refused through his servant.

• Chapter 2

  Juana prepares a seaweed poultice for the baby's swollen shoulder while Kino dives.

• Chapter 3

  The doctor arrives uninvited, gives the child a white powder, and returns an hour later to treat the illness that follows, while watching Kino's eyes for the pearl's hiding place.

• Chapter 6

  The rifleman's shot at the cry in the cave kills Coyotito; Juana and Kino carry him back to La Paz.