The Pearl

The pearl

Nature plays an important symbolic role throughout the story. Why do you think Steinback includes so many references to nature ?

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Kino is very much a part of his natural environment. Before the Pearl disturbs Kino's natural order with nature, Kino is quite at home with the nature's elements,

"Now, Kino's people had sung of everything that happened or existed. They had made songs to the fishes, to the sea in anger and to the sea in calm, to the light and the dark and the sun and the moon, and the songs were all in Kino and in his people – every song that had ever been made, even the ones forgotten. And as he filled his basket the song was in Kino, and the beat of the song was his pounding heart as it ate the oxygen from his held breath, and the melody of the song was the gray-green water and the little scuttling animals and the clouds of fish that flitted by and were gone." (Chapter 2)

As Kino's circumstances become more desperate, his relationship with nature becomes desperate as well. Kino begins to reflect an animal as he is being hunted by the trappers.