In Cannery Row, John Steinbeck reverts back to the realistic and naturalistic style he employed in Tortilla Flat. The novel is a rambling chronicle of the adventures (and misadventures) of employees in a California cannery factory and their friends. Of all the characters in the novel, none are quite as interesting as Doc and Mack. Steinbeck purportedly modeled Doc on marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts, his co-writer on The Sea of Cortez. This analysis will focus on Doc and Mack, both characters who in different ways are meant to reveal the ambiguous nature of society and human nature.
The denizens of Cannery Row are the disenfranchised from society, all of them existing in Cannery Row in order to escape the interaction and confrontation of life outside of the Row with its tightly enforced social norms and middle-class values. Mack is the leader of a group of boys who live in a storage shed they call the Palace Flophouse and Grill. Throughout the novel, Steinbeck likens this group of Cannery Row inhabitants as a counterpart to the inhabitants of a tidal pool. However, there is an objective observation of those on Cannery Row, almost as lacking in sentimentality by the author as Doc’s marine biology observations. For Mack represents a duality to the author. One the one hand, he, and the other boys, are losers in society. They are outcasts and parasites who surely “failed” in modern society to gain their “rightful” place, and thus some kind of identity. However, the author also appears to view them as a reaction against the middle-class values and norms of a society he felt driven solely by capitalistic values. As Doc describes Mack and the boys, we see that, while they are the lowest of society’s low, Steinbeck sees an admirable quality in them compared to those who forego simple pleasures and the joy of reflection in favor of materialistic pursuits which rob them of happiness, “There are your true philosoph...