Reality, Randomness, and Disorder Theme Analysis

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 to simply experience the book—and existence in general—for what it is. As such, he advocates for a certain kind of surrender to chaos, one that a number of characters in Cannery Row also learn to embrace. Because of this abstract commitment to disorder, the novel is sometimes difficult to analyze, since it’s challenging to draw broader meaning from a text that is primarily interested in exploring meaninglessness and the plain facts of everyday life. However, that Cannery Row often evades interpretation is itself a meditation on the nature of reality—a meditation that encourages readers to simply let the randomness and disorder of life wash over them.

In order to recreate the random disorder that is so much a part of being alive, Steinbeck often showcases his characters’ eccentricities. More specifically, he looks at the ways in which people contradict their own beliefs, thus demonstrating that even things people think they control—such as their own convictions—are just as chaotic and unpredictable as everything else in life. “Doc was a pure scientist and incapable of superstition and yet when he came in late one night and found a line of white flowers across the doorsill he had a bad time of it,” Steinbeck writes. “But most people in Cannery Row simply do not believe in such things and then live by them.” When Steinbeck says that “most people in Cannery Row” don’t “believe in such things,” he means that they think of themselves as too practical and levelheaded to believe in “superstition.” And yet, they still end up allowing these superstitions to dictate the way they live, proving that even their own internal lives, which seem so rational and controllable, are subject to contradiction and unpredictability. What’s more, Steinbeck offers no reason as to why, exactly, people can’t depend upon their own convictions. He presents readers with a strange discrepancy that sits at the heart of human existence, ultimately offering up an example of life’s inherent disorderliness without explaining it away. In this way, he encourages readers to embrace reality’s inscrutability, which frequently brings itself to bear on a person’s internal world.

Steinbeck’s representation of internal disorder mirrors the randomness of the outside world. Indeed, he explicitly calls attention to life’s messy disorganization as early as the first chapter of Cannery Row, in which he establishes his desire to present an unadorned portrait of reality. Because he is interested in capturing what it feels like to be alive, he decides to create a portrait of Cannery Row that has no agenda other than to reveal the nuances and complexities of reality. Having described Cannery Row as “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream,” he wonders how he might accurately portray all this on the page. “How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise—the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream—be set down alive?” By asking this question, he makes it clear that he wants to communicate what it’s like to live in Cannery Row without losing a sense of immediacy. In other words, he wants to make sure his writing is just as “alive” as the experience itself.

“When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole,” Steinbeck writes, “for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book—to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.” In this moment, Steinbeck states that he is going to “let the stories crawl in by themselves,” thereby implying that he doesn’t want to finesse anything that makes its way into Cannery Row. This, he believes, will enable him to preserve the authenticity of these stories, thereby allowing him to properly “set down” the experience of being “alive.” If these stories are going to simply “crawl in by themselves,” then it’s obvious they won’t necessarily adhere to structural or narrative formalities, instead creating an amalgamation of lived experience that—above all—honors the uncompromised and often incomprehensible feeling of reality itself.