존 스타인벡의 진주에 나타난 선악의 문제

Abstract

This article is to examine the problem of good and evil in John Steinbeck's The Pearl (1947). This work first appeared under the title of “The Pearl of the World" in December issue of Woman's Home Companion in 1945. And two years later, a separate edition of The Pearl appeared simultaneously with the release of the movie in December of 1947. Steinbeck deliberately fictionalized the folk-tale about an Indian boy into The Pearl. In this work, he first mentioned the sense of sin or guilt which he had ignored in his earlier works such as To a God Unknown and The Grapes of Wrath. The sense of sin or guilt is, needless to say, one of the most important concepts of Christianity. Most human guilt arises from greed. Steinbeck remarked about greed : “For it is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more (The Pearl 25)". This remark seems to suggest the limitless depth of human greed. At the same time Steinbeck showed that greed is the very stimulus for progress. In this article, I argue that the human behaviors arising from evil nature of humans are cheating, theft, destruction, arson, and homicide. In this way, Steinbeck traced the origin of sin in the greed of human mind in The Pearl. In conclusion, I observe about the sense of sin which was described from the viewpoint of Christianity and previously rejected in his earlier works. I think that this can be seen as a pattern of the human evil in the introspection of the problem of good and evil through his work.