Cannery Row Themes

In Cannery Row, a novel documenting the lives of outcasts and eccentrics, Steinbeck challenges conventional notions of virtue, ultimately arguing that society often champions qualities that don’t necessarily lead to happiness or widespread goodwill. In fact, he suggests that vice and virtue sometimes have an inverse relationship, one in which supposedly negative or sinful attributes can actually lead to virtuousness. To illustrate this point, he presents a gang of happy-go-lucky men who refuse to…

Melancholy and happiness are directly linked throughout Cannery Row. In fact, there is often a certain degree of joy embedded in moments of sadness and gloom, and many of the novel’s characters experience a poignant kind of loneliness that—as harrowing as it can be to feel alone—sometimes gives them an odd sense of “well-being.” Perhaps most strikingly, the reclusive painter Henri undergoes bouts of crushing loneliness and sadness, but he manages to simply experience…

In Cannery Row, Steinbeck is concerned first and foremost with capturing what it feels like to be alive in Monterey, California sometime before World War II. Rather than writing a completely cohesive narrative or adding complex literary embellishments, he simply presents readers with a series of linked vignettes that, when assembled, create an interconnected but abstract representation of life itself. In this way, he accentuates reality’s inherently disordered and random qualities, thereby encouraging readers…