Image of Man in
Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down
Dr. R. Vithya Prabha
Professor and Head
Department of English
Dr. N. G. P. Arts and Science College
Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India
Abstract:
The purpose of the
article is that free men organised in a voluntary democratic group have
strength that tyranny connote break. The social organism he has in mind is
occupied with Norway and the tyranny in Nazi Germany. Image of man as an ideal
leader is reflected in Mayor Orden. He is a product of centuries of Political
and Cultural Revolution. Steinbeck prefers to universalise this conflict and
make it relevant to the manifestations of symptoms even in his own nation. The
coastal town of a peace-loving country is taken over an aggressive power, but
hostile, continue and leads to face the firing squad.
Keywords: Conflict; Cultural and Political Revolution; Nazi, Society;
Tyranny
Steinbeck’s most
significant work relating to war is The Moon is Down. It is a kind of
celebration of the durability of democracy. Steinbeck exposes the folly of war,
the self-defeating futility of totalitarian regimentation and the anguish and
frustration which men and women, both persecutors and victims, pass through. He
espouses here the Socratean ideal of free men and suggests the efficacy of
Gandhian passive resistance.
The Moon is Down provides an exalted
image of the political man. The group is voluntary association of free man, who
are above any kind of intimidation, external or internal to the group. The
people are quite different from the striking fruit pickers or the migrant
labourers. They are free men, a big family, voluntarily welded into an organic
group, which chooses its leaders to carry out its common will. Further the
broader line between the leader and the lead has disappeared; everyone is a
potential leader. Such a highly evolved and thoroughly enfranchised group as
the townspeople is brought in the novel. Dr. Winter spotlights this
distinction:
They think that just
because they have only one leader and one head, we are all like that. They know
that ten heads lopped off will destroy them, but we are a free people. We have
as many heads as we have people, and in a time of need leaders pop up among us
like mushrooms. (132)
The concept of
leadership in a society grounded in long democratic tradition is also explained
to Col. Lanser by Mayor Orden. “Some people accept appointed leaders and obey
them. But my people have elected me. They made me and they can unmake me.
Perhaps they will if they think I have gone over to you” (24). He adds that his
people “don’t like to have others think for them”.
This voluntary
association of individuals in a free society is contrasted with a regimented
society controlled by a self-appointed leader. Steinbeck’s opposition to a
totalitarian system was effectively expressed in his Sea of Cortez.
Because of its lack of resilience, its continued existence is also jeopardised
in The log from the Sea of Cortez.
A too greatly
integrated system or society is in danger of destruction since the removal of
one unit may cripple the whole.
. . . Twenty-five key
men destroyed could make the Soviet Union stagger, but, we could lose our
Congress, our president and our general staff and nothing much would have
happened (47).
Free men have such
adaptability that they invariably throw up the right type of leadership when
required and succeed in the struggle for survival. Though they are initially
faced with reverses, they finally win. Mayor Orden told the colonel in his
quiet but emphatic way that the enemy forces would be destroyed and driven out
because the people did not like to be conquered. Free men cannot start a war,
but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a
leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and
the free men who win wars.
Mayor Orden is a
product of centuries of political and cultural revolution. Inheritor of a
cherished and continuously nurtured tradition, he symbolises the hopes and
aspirations of the group which he represents. Col. Lanser understands the true
relationship in which he is held by his people. He tells the quisling Corelli:
Mayor Orden is more than a mayor. ... He is his people. He knows what they are
doing, thinking, without asking, because he will think what they think. By
watching him I will know them (46-47).
In his wisdom, Orden
also realises that he is only one among equals and that it is his office which
lends importance to him and not vice versa. He tells his wife that “the Mayor
is an idea conceived by free men. It will escape arrest (141). Nobody can arrest
the idea of freedom! The real greatness of Orden is not because unto the last
he keeps faith with his people. If he had done otherwise, they would have
disowned him promptly. He is great in the sense that he holds aloft the highest
of human values. He thinks nobly of man. Orden gives expression to his hope for
man. He believes that man is endowed with unique qualities. “. . . I am a
little man and this is a little town, but there must be a spark in little men
that can burst into flame” (134). Significantly he tells Colone Lanser that the
latter has taken up “the one impossible job in the world, the one thing that
can’t be done” in other words “To break men’s spirit permanently”. (65)
By delineating Orden,
Steinbeck adds a new element to his image of man. It is the privilege which a
free spirit alone possesses viz. the capacity to choose. The right to make a
choice about good or evil is the prerogative of an enfranchised individual. The
uncommitted understanding which refuses to take sides, characteristics of
Steinbeck’s earlier non-teleological thinking, undergoes a change. Hereafter he
thinks of a man as endowed with a free will which makes it felt through
discriminating action.
Mayor Orden is the
highly evolved individual who reaches out towards a moral choice, independent
of the concept of original sin. He is a courageous Socratean humanist who is
indifferent to life and death but is most vitally concerned with correct
action. This engenders in him an unusual feeling of fearlessness and exaltation
“as though I were bigger and better than I am”. He tells Colonel Lanser: “I
have no choice of living or dying . . . but I do have a choice of how I do it”
(139). Earlier in his conversation with Dr. Winter, Orden quotes the words of
Socrates: . . . a man who is good for
anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying: he ought only to
consider whether he is doing right or wrong” (134). Orden’s victory over
himself is ultimately the most fascinating aspect of his character.
The Moon is Down is not merely a
patriotic tract, breathing the narrow spirit of nationalism. It rather
celebrates the wroth of man and envisages the universal prototype of
enfranchised human being. Even the Germans come out well because, as Steinbeck
stated in his essay, My Shorts Novels, I had written of Germans as men”
(24). He exposes tyranny as an evil outgrowth in the evolutionary
transformation of the modern man and attacks it as a pernicious symptom found
in all countries and climes. The novel provides the rewarding image of the
fully formed man who succeeds, by his innate strength and also by the
compulsive forces of tradition and circumstances; in
winning is sounding victory over his own weak self.
Works Cited
Allen, Walter. The English and American Novel from the
Twenties to Our Time. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1964.
Davis, Robert Murray.
Ed. Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical
Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1972.
Levant, Howard. The Novels of John Steinbeck: A Critical
Study. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974.
Steinbeck, John. The Moon is Down. The Viking Press, Inc.
New York. 1942.
Tedlock Jr. E. W. and
C.V. Wicker. Steinbeck and His Critics.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957.
Wagenknecht, Edward. Cavalcade ofthe American Novel. New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1952.