Characterization of Doc in Cannery Row

This study will examine the characterization of Doc in John Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row. The novel is a celebration of life, including the grime and the glory, and Doc's character is meant to personify this broadly inclusive philosophy. As we read of Cannery Row's people:

Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps. gamblers, and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing (1).

Doc is a scientific man, to be sure, but he is also a man grounded in the pleasures of everyday life. We first see him leaving his Western Biological Laboratory to buy five quarts of beer. His defiance of powerful institutions is symbolized in his suggested "method for getting revenge on a bank if anyone should ever want to: `Rent a safety deposit box, then deposit in it one fresh salmon and go away for six months'" (15). Doc is a man who accepts and appreciates all of the many contradictory facets of life.

Doc's Western Biological is a kind of clearing house for all living things:

Western Biological deals in strange and beautiful wares. It sells the lovely animals of the sea. . . . And [it] sells bugs and snails and spiders. . . . You can order anything living from Western Biological and sooner or later you will get it (15).

As proprietor of this establishment, Doc is meant to be an earthly god of sorts, and if there is any dou

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back upstairs. There wasn't a thing in the world he could do (37). Doc is not a physician, but he knows enough about medicine to help the people in the community medically, and he is available for them in many other ways as well. He has many friends and is a beloved member of the town. However, Doc is like other leaders in that he experiences a certain sense of isolation at the same time that he is loved and admired: In spite of his friendliness and his friends Doc was a lonely and a set-apart man. . . . In a group, Doc seemed always alone. . . . Even in the dear close contact with a girl . . . Doc would be lonely (62). For all his wisdom and knowledge of life and death, Doc's discovery of the dead girl on the reef overwhelms him: "He shivered and his eyes were wet the way they get in the focus of great beauty" (68). When his friends throw him a party and do much damage to his lab before he even arrives home from the trip on which he found the girl's body, Doc lets out his frustration and rage by hitting Mack a few times, showing once again that he is fully human. In fact, he ends up praising Mack and his friends for their straightforward approach to life: look at them. They are your true philosophers. . . . In a time when p

Category: Literature - C