[Name of the Writer]

[Name of Instructor]

[Subject]

[Date]

Technique in John Steinbeck Novels the Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men and In Dubious Battle

Introduction

John Steinbeck has been writing for 50 years during which he had composed best selling while generating considerable controversies. He had been buffeted by the slings and arrows of mercurial critics, winning over generations of readers and has earned one of the most prestigious recognitions ever granted to writers, the Nobel Prize. His stories have been showing his love and attention to all of these things; however, it also reflected his affection and tremendous fascination with other lives and people. His characters varied across dynamic ethnic, socio- economic classes and racial backgrounds. His writings have been sought to depict their personal experience of the materialistic world with honesty and dignity that was espoused as necessary for human understanding by him (Shillinglaw, p. n.d.).

Steinbeck Techniques' History and Context

Steinbeck believed in interconnections between an individual and his natural and social context which could surely be applied to him and from that point he had been deeply influenced by his life in California. His fictions have been speaking to idealization of California as a modern Eden, to its anxiety about identity and its frontier past. His work that has most thoroughly investigated the identity of California includes two stories from the Red Pony: The Great Mountains and The Leader of the People (Saxton, p. 249).

The Great Mountains could be defined as an episode that moves around an old man from Mexican era of California, Gitano (Spanish for gypsy), arrived on the ranch of Tiflin. He had returned from a lifetime of wandering to die in his birthplace (which, presumably, he was banished from upon the Californian settlement of Euro-Americans). His arrival was a return from the past to present that reminded Americans their manifested identity which has been at the cost of identities of others (Owens, p. 1).

According to Loftis, The Leader of the People has described the arrival of another old man, grandfather of Jody, a frontiersman who had led a wagon train to California. Grandfather remembered his days of heroism and adventure, but he observed the staid with a jaundiced eye and an ordinary ranch world in his surroundings. Grandfather had been spiritually displaced and out of sorts Gitano suggested that California's Americanization had been a mutually unsettled experience. These stories have also testified to the vitality of the past, even after passing of generations: Jody, for instance, was concerned that is never going to be another heroic time as that of Grandfather and Gitano. The boy was living in their shadows (Loftis, p. 126).

Living in the shadows of the greats of Yore could be an experience to which the young author was sympathetic. As a young child, Steinbeck has been influenced by the heroic tales of King Arthur and Sir Walter Scott and these were materialized by him in the work of 20th century (Jackson, p. n.d.). Steinbeck has used the archaic form of episodic cycles of the story, for ...