He is insulted and kills a man; as a result, he must flee for his life, and it is this flight that is the substance of the story. Steinbeck begins his narrative much as he did in The Red Pony — that is, he carefully describes the setting first of all. Steinbeck is concerned that his readers can clearly view and understand the settings of his stories and novels.
Thus, his characters become more vividly realistic because they reflect the values of their towns or farms or their regions. This, in turn, helps explain their actions and the motivations for the events that occur in the story. Here, Steinbeck shows us the Torres' farm. He does not say, in a word, that the family is poor.
He parallels their poverty with that of the land. They do not live on level ground, for example; their farm is situated on a few sloping acres above a cliff that drops sharply into the sea. They must eke out a living on a landscape that is threatening and uncivilized. In addition, the land is as dramatic as the story itself will become.
Note, particularly, the lean and chiseled sentences into which Steinbeck inserts adjectives that enhance and create suspense within the reader even before the story itself unfolds. The ocean that is below the Torres' farm "hisses," and the farm buildings on the hillside "huddle" like "little clinging aphids. Yet they are a unit and they "huddle" for protection from the elements and from the large white Anglo settlement that surrounds them in the towns and those who farm the rich fertile fields of the upper lands, far above the Torres.
As Mexicans, and in particular as poor Mexicans, the Torres are like aphids to the white community because they are equated with pests, nuisances to the so-called civilized white community.
Furthermore, the Torres' farm buildings are described as being "crouched" low to the ground, and Steinbeck says that it seems as though they might blow into the sea. But they do not, and this fact is important, for although the Torres' house is described as a shack and the barn is "rattling" and "rotten," and although the buildings are "bitten" with sea salt and "beaten" by the winds that lash the stony hills, the Torres family and their farm survive because of their determination and their defiance.
He learned many years ago from his family that they must defy the poor soil and the weather and the lack of friends to survive. Ironically, she calls his knife, one of his most prized possessions, a "toy-baby" and chides him for playing games with it. In the Spanish culture, a young girl's fifteenth birthday is usually celebrated; her coming of age is given the most expensive celebration that the family can either afford to pay for or to borrow for the event; it is not so with the young men in the community.
A young man must do something daring or brave in order to be called a man. Later, he does, in fact, become a man because of the code of the Torres family. I could not allow. He used the extension of his arm — in this case, his knife. Steinbeck develops this story with classic simplicity, dividing it into three sections. He has lost that "fragile quality By introducing this concept into the story, Steinbeck creates a story that is far more than that of a mere "pursuer-and-pursued" story; he uses the story to comprise a concept of man's constant struggle against opposing forces.
Steinbeck's ultimate idea, perhaps, concerns man's constant struggle against the hostile forces which surround him. We live in a hostile world where we are constantly confronted by vicious forces that try to destroy man.
As in the stories that encompass The Red Pony , the violence of "Flight" begins, ironically, on a sunny day. His mother grinds corn and pats out tortillas for her family, while the young children beat abalones to make them tender.
That night, Mama Torres is at peace, thinking that her oldest son is having good food in Monterey. His mother addresses him as "thou," and the appellation is startling, but it is simply a literal rendering of the intimate form of "you.
He has done a deed of a man and he committed this deed because it was part of a code of his people. Yet his mother is slow to realize that the boy whom she sent over the rim of the mountains to Monterey is no longer a child. If he has wine; if that is the reason for his talking so strangely, then he should go to bed.
No longer does he seem fragile and no longer is there laughter in his eyes. Nor does he seem the lazy "peanut," or the "big sheep," or the "foolish chicken. His account of the knife fight is brief; his mother hears, understands, and prepares him for his flight. The family, at this time, reacts as a unit; no motion is wasted: water bags, blankets, and beef jerky — all are packed and are ready within minutes. He is also given his father's rifle. Note, here, how Mama Torres teaches the children her code of values.
All this has happened — a death has occurred, a young Mexican's life is in peril, and Steinbeck is showing us that, as the world turns in a single revolution, that we must be conscious of its everlasting revolving as we struggle, individually, or as a family, to survive within our small confines on this vast planet.
She tells him not to be "caught like a chicken" — that is, he must die like a man. She, we feel, has little hope for her son, but she is demanding in her own gentle way.
Her son's manhood is most important to her, to him, and to his dead father's memory. Soon he will be tested and if he must die, he must die like a man. He follows a little trail through the mountains. Surely he himself does not know; perhaps that is why Steinbeck entitled his story with a single word, connoting a soaring above whatever is threatening, with no destination ahead. The emphasis is on the flight itself, with no goal other than survival. Now he must prove to himself that he is worthy of his manhood.
Yet, as he rides away from his home, his body is struck by two lights — the last rays of the night and the new day's lights, warring rays akin to the divergent codes which were responsible for his murdering the insulting white man.
This is very possibly due to the fact that he was killed by his father. Huck was reported to be missing by the townspeople. The fact that he was missing after his father's night of drunken rage certainly points to Pap being the main suspected assailant.
His absence following the night of his fathers attacks alludes to a further possible violence, including the unfortunate murder of his…. One of his classmates borrowed a sweater from Holden and of course he never gets it back in fact that student decided to end his own life by throwing himself out a window.
Eventually the classmate was buried in this sweater. How could Holden possibly be happy considering tragedies like these happening all around him. It puts Holden's view of life into perspective considering his brilliant brother died young and he was left here to live without Allie in his life. After losing Allie, Holden seems to lose the value in his own life.
Besides, the ghost father tells Hamlet that he was sleeping in the garden when a villain poured poison into his ear. This supports the fact that his death was unnatural and a foul murder.
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Words: - Pages: 8. Words: - Pages: 4. Similarities Between Holden And The Catcher In The Rye One of his classmates borrowed a sweater from Holden and of course he never gets it back in fact that student decided to end his own life by throwing himself out a window.
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