coyote is not just a wild animal or a sly, lazy animal, but a form of the Trickster in some Native American traditions. A Trickster is a "disruptive character appearing in various forms in the folklore of many cultures," according toMerriam Webster's Tenth Collegiate Dictionary. The Trickster is part divine and part animal. He has a skill or magic power which he uses sometimes to benefit humankind but which sometimes backfires on him. Often he can change his shape. He freely crosses the boundaries both between human and animal and between the divine and the human.

During both his nights on the mountain, Pepe hears a coyote. Like Coyote the Trickster, Pepe has a dual nature. Mama Torres is certainly aware of this. Her son is both boy and man, and human but with potential to act with animal-like instinctive reflexes. Each time he asserts to her that he is a "man," she refuses to acknowledge it, responding that he is a "peanut" or "a foolish chicken." At the same time, she thinks of him as "fine and brave." After Pepe rides off to Monterey, her younger son Emilio asks her, "Did Pepe come to be a man today?'' She replies, "A boy gets to be a man when a man is needed.'' She thinks Pepe is "nearly a man now." When Pepe returns from Monterey changed, he again asserts, "I am a man now, Mama," and this time she nods and says, "Yes, thou art a man, my poor little Pepe. Thou art a man. I have seen it coming on thee. I have watched you throwing the knife into the post, and I have been afraid.'' For her, Pepe is at the same time both a man and her "poor little Pepe." But the man she acknowledges is the one who too easily throws the knife, the one she has feared he might become. The distinction between "man" versus "child" and "man" versus "animal" is made early in the story.

When Pepe begins his flight to the mountains, "his face was stern, relentless and manly." But as he goes on, he is gradually reduced from riding to walking to crawling like an animal up the dry mountains. Pepe, the man-boy and the man-animal slides on his stomach, wriggles, and squirms his way forward, much like the rattlesnake he encounters. He gets up on his feet "[w]ith the effort of a hurt beast." When he tries to speak, he can only make "thick hissing" sounds. When he drains his infected hand, "he threw back his head and whined like a dog."

The terrain itself almost seems to take on human characteristics. The trail "staggers" down. The granite is "tortured." The oak trees "whisper." The mountain has "jagged rotten teeth" and "granite teeth." Pepe begins by observing the animals, but later, they are observing him. After the mountain lion watches him for hours, then slinks away into the brush, "Pepe took his rifle in his left hand and he glided into the brush almost as quietly as the lion had. Only when the dark came did he stand up." Pepe has become more animal than man.

As the plot of the story resembles a folktale concerning a Trickster, other aspects of the story also resemble a folktale. The story is set in an indeterminate time, almost a "once upon a time." Pepe rides to Monterey like a youth in search of his fortune or his manhood. When his manhood is challenged, he reacts unthinkingly and with fatal results, and he must flee for his life. His mother gives him talismans of his dead father, the coat and the rifle, and he rides into the wilderness. "The dark watchers" in the wilderness add a supernatural element to the story. In the folktale, anything can happen. Frogs change into princes and men into toads. On his flight, Pepe is "changed" into an animal who crawls, wriggles, and worms his way along. At the end, he seems to change back into a man, depending on how the reader interprets his stand against his pursuers.

But while the story has some elements of a folktale, it is at the same time a naturalist work of fiction. Naturalism refers to a style of writing fiction which is almost scientific in its attempt to portray characters and how they react to their environment. This approach to fiction is, according to M. H. Abrams in A Glossary of Literary Terms, "a product of post-Darwinian biology in the mid-nineteenth century," which holds that "a human being belongs entirely in the order of nature and does not have a soul or any other mode of participation in a religious or spiritual world beyond nature; that such a being is therefore merely a higher-order animal whose character and fortunes are determined by two kinds of forces, heredity and environment." The folktale and the naturalistic story are very different, almost opposite, styles. For Steinbeck to superimpose them in the same story is for him to write a story which is based on a built-in contradiction.

This type of contradiction may be the story's major strength. It helps to explain why the ending is ambiguous. Is Pepe a man or an animal? Or, like the Trickster, is he two things at once, animal and divine? Perhaps the story resolves this question by refusing to resolve it. This leaves the reader to draw his or her own conclusions as to whether Pepe succeeds in becoming a man.

Source: Joyce Munro, "Overview of 'Flight'," in Short Stories for Students, Gale, 1998. Munro is an lawyer who works for UAW—Ford Legal Services. She is pursuing a doctorate in British and American literature at Wayne State University.

Steinbeck's interest in marine biology was inflamed to a passion in the early 1930s. The sea, with its endless surgings and its proliferation of life, would remain a powerful influence upon his life and art throughout his career. We can acknowledge the homing quiet and clashing of dubious battles in his valleys; we can celebrate the high, sun-splashed reaches of his mountains; but we must return over and over to the timeless swell of life and death in the sea as a metaphorical pattern as well as a geographical place in his work.

The sea represents, at once, life and death. For Steinbeck it is the mother: the bringer of life in swarming generation. It is also, beneath its unruly and deceptive surface, a place of primeval violence. That uneasy juxtaposition is captured superbly in Cannery Row. In chapter six, Doc surveys the sea, from quiet tidal pools to the deep reaches. His vision moves from the serene grace of the shallows to the primeval undertows. There a chaotic world of ferocity reigns, a feral world. For Steinbeck, probing into the sea is a probing into the origins of life itself, a descent into the mythic subconsciousness of human nature. From The Log from the Sea of Cortez to The Winter of Our Discontent, the sea functions powerfully in Steinbeck's prose.

The sea also functions metaphorically in "Flight"—by its absence. In one of his notebooks of the early 1930s, during one of his frequent breaks from writing stories to pen personal reflections, Steinbeck turned his attention to the sea. "Man is so little removed from the water," he observes. "When he is near to the sea near the shore where the full life is, he feels terror and nostalgia." There we find our evolutionary predecessors, our lost memory "Come down to the tide pool, when the sea is out and let us look into our old houses, let us avoid our old enemies."

Having paused to look into the tidal pools, Steinbeck recounts the course of humanity:

We came up out of the water to the barren dry, the desert dry. It's so hard to get used to the land. It is a deep cry. Oh man who in climbing up has become lower. What good thing but comes out of the depths. What nobility except from pain, what strength except out of anger, what change except from discomfort. We are a cross race so filled with anger that if we do not use it all in fighting for a warm full body, we fight among ourselves. Animals fight nature for the privilege of living but man having robbed nature of some of its authority must fight man for the same right.

It is precisely that movement into the dry reaches, where we fight like animals "for the privilege of living," that marks the thematic pattern of "Flight." The story is a fictionalization of the idea Steinbeck expressed in this notebook entry; Pepe is very much modern man in search of his manhood and finding the animal within. But, as Steinbeck discovered in telling the story, Pepe also discovers something more, a human spirit that is inviolable and undefeatable, possessing an enduring power that lies below and rises above the animal in man.

The change in the title of the story from "Manhunt" to "Flight" is in itself significant. The story changes from a simple narration of a posse's manhunt to an exploration of one individual's flight into unknown regions—a spiritual odyssey into the high, arid regions far from the nurturing sea. Like the change in title, the story itself changed dramatically in the writing. As it first developed, far more attention was given to the knifing itself. After buying the necessary things in Monterey, Pepe stops at a church to light a candle for his father and then visits the house of Mrs. Rodriguez and her two daughters. After affirming that Pepe has grown to be a man, Mrs. Rodriguez tells him that the surly Carlos is drunk in the kitchen. Pepe, avowing that he is a man, says he will send the troublesome Carlos away. He enters the kitchen to confront him.

The passage that follows, from the Long Valley notebook, amplifies the scene. In a fashion he adopted to conserve ink and paper during this penurious time, Steinbeck did not pause in his writing to observe minor paragraph breaks:

"Awaken!" said Pepe. He shook a pan. A big black face arose from the table, and sullen sleepy eyes looked at him. "Who are you?" "I am Pepe Torres. Mrs. Rodriguez wants you to go away now." Behind him, Mrs. Rodriguez said helplessly, "This is the son of Jose Torres. You know him, Carlos." The sullen eyes looked at her and then back at Pepe. "I know Jose Torres. He was a thief." The sentence was uttered as an insult, was meant to be insulting. Pepe stepped back. "I am a man." He looked inquiringly at Mrs. Rodriguez. She shook her head. Pepe's stomach was sad and then ice got into his stomach and then the ice grew up to his beard. His hand went into his pocket and came out and hung listlessly in front of him. He was surprised at the sound of his voice. "Thou art a liar and a pig." Carlos stood up. "Dirty naked Indian. You say that to me?" Then Pepe's hand flashed. The blade seemed to bloom from the black knife in midflight. It thudded into the man's chest to the handle. Carlos' mouth was open in amazement. His two black hands came up and found the knife and half pulled it out. And then he coughed, fell forward on the table and drove it in again. Pepe looked slowly around at the woman. His sweet girlish mouth was quizzical, "I am a man," he said. "I will go now."

While Steinbeck conveyed the entire scene indirectly in the final version, having Pepe report what happened in several quick sentences, the excised portion shows that the act of killing is allied with Pepe's manhood, and death itself is attended by blackness, both of the knife and of Carlos.

The opening line of the next paragraph in the first draft, inked out in a heavy line, indicates one direction the story might have taken: "They found him in the church sitting in a pew and looking at the lights on the altar. He had said many [undecipherable word] Ave Marias." After the crossed-out line, Steinbeck wrote, "Pepe's movements were swift but unhurried." He heads back to his house, covering the same route through Point Lobos that he had taken earlier. From here the final version follows with a few exceptions. In the first draft, Pepe shoots one of the trackers, in the final version he does not. Most of the revisions were the ones Steinbeck typically made, changing passive verbs to active constructions and sharpening details. The materials included in the two-page notebook entry, "Addenda to Flight," written several days after the first draft, are incorporated into the conclusion of the final version.

With its riveting power as a story, its feral imagery that stalks nearly every paragraph, and its mystical ambiguity, "Flight" has both enchanted and puzzled critics. It has occasioned some of the very best literary criticism of Steinbeck's work as scholars match their wits against a compelling drama. For its sheer, evocative power, few of Steinbeck's short stories match it.

Artistically, the tale is a tour de force, with layer upon layer of craftsmanship revealed in close reading. The ostensible plot and conflict—Pepe's quest for manhood against intractable odds of humanity and nature—appear simple enough. Since his father's death from a rattlesnake bite, Pepe inherits the place of manhood in the family. The one legacy from his father is the black-handled knife, with which Pepe demonstrates a fluid grace. But Mama Torres is reluctant to allow Pepe the place of manhood, berating him incessantly as a "peanut," "lazy coyote," or "big sheep." Nonetheless, she "thought him fine and brave, but she never told him so."

As Pepe leaves for Monterey to buy some medicine, his parting words are, "I will be careful. I am a man." The trip is allied with his manhood, and indeed he will acquire the adult knowledge of death on the trip. When a drunken man at Mrs. Rodriguez' s house calls him a name—in the first draft he called Jose Torres a thief—Pepe's sense of manly honor will not permit it. The knife, says Pepe, "went almost by itself."

Many readers have focused exclusively upon that action and the subsequent flight to the exclusion of suggestive imagery patterns undergirding the tale. Thus, Dan Vogel sees the tale as "the ordeal of transformation from innocence to experience, from purity to defilement." In a brief note on the story ["Steinbeck's 'Flight,'" Explicator 18 (Nov. 1959)], William M. Jones suggests,

The details of Pepe's flight show how Pepe gradually conquered the family pride that caused his original sin and how through suffering he expiated that sin. Not only does he subdue the proud flesh . . . but in so doing he regained a place in nature that his family, scratching away to get what they could out of the world, had failed to find. This progress seems to be Steinbeck's explanation of the maturing process.

Walter K. Gordon argues, "What is important in 'Flight' is not the crime itself but Pepe's mental and physical response to it, how he deports himself when the circumstances are propitious for a boy to become a man," an effort at which, in Gordon's view, Pepe ultimately fails. Like Steinbeck's note in the Tortilla Flat notebook, detailing humanity's trek from the sea to the arid heights, however, the story bears a yet more supple richness and probing of what it means to be human than these views suggest.

In Flannery O'Connor's "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," Mr. Shiftlet, spellbound by his own empty phrases, asks Mrs. Lucynell Crater, "What is a man?" The answer comes some time later: "a moral intelligence." The same question puzzled John Steinbeck. Is humanity the product of evolutionary eons, the offspring of the dark sea's surging?

The Log from the Sea of Cortez suggests as much:

There is tied up to the most primitive and powerful racial or collective instinct a rhythm sense or "memory" which affects everything and which in the past was probably more potent than it is now It would at least be more plausible to attribute these profound effects to devastating and instinct-searig tidal influences during the formative times of the early race history of organisms.

Or, in Steinbeck's view, is humanity also a moral intelligence? His answer unfolded steadily throughout his literary career. In The Grapes of Wrath, he speculates,

For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man—when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.

And in a letter to John O'Hara written a decade later, he asserted,

The great change in the last 2,000 years was the Christian idea that the individual soul was very precious. Unless we can preserve and foster the principle of the preciousness of the individual mind, the world of men will either disintegrate into a screaming chaos or will go into a grey slavery. And that fostering and preservation seem to me our greatest job.

Steinbeck's own answer to the question is that humanity is unique by virtue of mind and spirit.

In the hot, sun-blasted world of "Flight," however, when a lazy boy asserts his manhood with a knife, when civilization's code of conduct is violated and the posse mounts, man is very much reduced to an animal. One recalls Stembeck's reflection in his notebook: "Oh man who in climbing up has become lower.'' Pepe's flight into the mountains is also a devolution, paced by a divestment of civilized tools and in incrementally intensifying animal imagery. He loses gun and knife, saddle, horse, and food. John Ditsky notes the pattern of loss [in "Steinbeck's 'Flight': The Ambiguity of Manhood"]:

Beyond the simple deterioration of his possessions—as when his clothing tears away or his flesh is ripped—leading to a contemplation of man's naked state like that in King Lear, there is the importance of the fact that the objects just named are Pepe's from his father; they are, as the knife is in fact described, "his inheritance." Pepe's attempt to sustain the manhood he has claimed in a single violent act—by means of the tools which were his father's badge of manhood and his estate—fails, he is finally stripped down to what he brings with him within himself: his own gifts, his own courage.

Stripped of civilized tools, Pepe's movements are increasingly described in verbs that suggest a primordial or serpentine creature. Pepe "crawled," "wormed," "wriggled," "darted," "flashed," "slid," "writhed," and "squirmed" in the final stages. Furthermore, his paralyzing thirst strips him of the one thing that separates humanity from animals—speech: "His tongue tried to make words, but only a thick hissing came from between his lips." Even his tongue becomes infected with blackness—"Between his lips the tip of his black tongue showed"—and the only sound of which he is capable is a "thick hiss."

As several critics have mentioned, a third pattern is woven into the loss of civilized tools and the heavy use of animal imagery—the increasing images of darkness. From his early fascination with the lights on the altar and the sun-swept cliffs of his home, Pepe's world is subsumed by blackness, culminating in the Dark Watchers. He leaves for his flight on a morning when "Moonlight and daylight fought with each other, and the two warring qualities made it difficult to see." Louis Owens observes,

The theme of death is woven on a thread of blackness through the story. It is Pepe's black knife which initiates the cycle of death. When Pepe flees he wears his dead father's black coat and black hat. It is the two "black ones," Rosy and Emilio, who prophesy Pepe's death. The line of gangrene running the length of Pepe's arm is black, foreshadowing his death, and it is the "dark watchers" who finally symbolize death itself. From the beginning of the story, Pepe grows increasingly dark, until in the end he will be black like the watchers.

The climactic final portrait is thick with darkness, and even as a new morning breaks the sky, the eagle, which has been present from the start, is replaced by predatory black vultures.

Yet that progression is incomplete. Too many readers confine their attention to that stripping and figurative pattern. At his moment of most profound abnegation, wandering a black wasteland, stripped of civilized tools, an animal contending with animals, Pepe reclaims a uniquely human attribute, the power at once to defy and to submit to his own death. It is the conscious decision of a human, not an animal, and it is accompanied by spiritual awareness: "Pepe bowed his head quickly. He tried to speak rapid words but only a thick hiss came from his lips. He drew a shaky cross on his breast with his left hand." When the first bullet misses him, Pepe hauls his broken body straighter still to receive the death blow.

John Antico is one of the few scholars to pay attention to that scene and the story's religious dimension. He observes [in "A Reading of Steinbeck's 'Flight'," Modern Fiction Studies 11 (Spring 1965)], "It is only by standing up on two feet and facing death that the sub-human Pepe can give birth to Man. An animal does not face death; death happens to it. A man is aware of what he is facing, and it is this awareness that makes him a man.'' Yet, Antico wonders what exactly enables Pepe to get up and face death. What is this quality of manhood that he has discovered? It is not a miracle in response to his sign of the cross. Rather, it arises from an indomitable power within Pepe himself:

Indeed it was a long struggle for Man to emerge, and what prompts this sub-human to get up from all fours and stand on two feet is the inexpressible quality within him which later developed into what we call religion. To attempt to name or define this quality would, however, falsify it. It is not God or religion as civilized man knows them, but that inner quality which eventually leads to religion and the concept of God.

Many have read the story as a supreme document of literary naturalism—as indeed it is. Stripped of all civilized customs and tools, man engages in an animalistic struggle for survival. In the naturalist tradition, "Flight" ranks with London's "To Light a Fire'' and Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets as among the best of a kind. But the story is not only that. It is a discovery of what separates humankind from the animals.

In the article "Cutting Loose," Michael Ratcliffe provides a narrative account of an interview with Steinbeck in 1962 on the occasion of his receiving the Nobel Prize. Steinbeck reflected on the Nobel speech he had made, pointing out, "A story is a parable; putting in terms of human action the morals—and immorals—that society needs at the time. Everyone leaves the bullfight a little braver because one man stood up to a bull. Isaiah wrote to meet the needs of his people, to inspire them. It is a meeting of needs." Ratcliffe asked what kinds of needs, and Steinbeck responded, "Needs of beauty, courage, reform—sometimes just pure pride.'' It may well be that Pepe' s response in "Flight'' is pure, indomitable pride. His standing to receive the fatal bullet is the asseveration his speechless tongue can no longer make: I am a man! But it is signaled by religious signs, and that too is a pattern of the story. Antico correctly notes, however, that

One hesitates to mention the numerous triads with all their Biblical overtones throughout the story, for then one is tempted to find or seek out strict Biblical parallels or a rigid sort of symbolism or religious allegory which twists the significance of these details all out of proportion Steinbeck's method is not symbolism or allegory; he merely suggests religion and Biblical overtones; he actually seems to blur the edges of his analogies so that one feels a religious atmosphere but not a strict and limited Christian reference.

Antico's caution is well observed. The religious references do not suggest that the story is a parable, a modern crucifixion of a saintly man. Rather, the imagery supports the central premise—that Pepe, finally, is not an animal but a man discovering, albeit tragically, that indomitable, spiritual consciousness of himself as human that separates him from the animals.

While Steinbeck changed the title of his story from "Manhunt" to "Flight" to draw attention from the civilization that pursues to the individual that flees, there is an applicable irony in the first title. Pepe also hunts his manhood, and in his act of knowing acceptance, he finds it. While the story bears all the trappings of a naturalistic document, or to use the terminology Steinbeck was becoming fond of, a nonteleological telling, the flight of Pepe does arrive at a goal.

Source: John H. Timmerman, "'Flight': What Is Man That Thou Art Mindful of Him?" in The Dramatic Landscape of Steinbeck's Short Stories, University of Oklahoma Press, 1990, pp. 189-98. Timmerman is affiliated with the Department of English at Calvin College.

Published initially in The Long Valley (1938), "Flight," a work that one of Steinbeck's most discerning critics [Warren French, in John Steinbeck, 1975] has called a tale of "frustrated young manhood," a "depressing account of an unprepared youth's failure to achieve maturity," has often been regarded as one of John Steinbeck's best stories. Peter Lisca, in his analysis of the story [in The Wide World of John Steinbeck, 1958], sees Pepe Torres' flight as reflecting two levels of meaning. "On the physical level," Lisca observes, "Pepe's penetration into the desert mountains is directly proportional to his increasing separation from civilized man and reduction to the state of a wild animal. . . . The symbolic meaning of Pepe's flight moves in the opposite direction. On this level, the whole action of the story goes to show how man, even when stopped of all his civilized accouter-ments . . . , is still something more than an animal."

Other critics have also given notice to the story's animal references. Joseph Fontenrose, for instance, in correcting an erroneous comment made by Edmund Wilson about The Long Valley, generally interprets the plants and animals of the stories in this collection as having a "symbolic function, helping us to understand the human characters who are really central and really human." John M. Ditsky, who sees the meaning of Pepe's manhood as ambivalent—"the contradictions inherent in a situation in which a man gains his life only to lose it''—generally perceives that Pepe must revert to brute animalism as an essential stage in becoming a man, or at any rate must use animal mannerisms to "preserve his manhood." Ditsky goes on to offer only brief support for this claim by citing in the last part of the story Pepe's movements, his primitive way of treating his wounded hand, his lancing of his infection, and his desperate digging in an attempt to find water.

The most cogent and perceptive treatment of animal references in "Flight" yet to appear is a brief article by Hilton Anderson, which persuasively demonstrates that "by repeated references to snakes, by the use of such words as crawl, wiggle, wriggle, zig-zag, and hiss, and by his physical descriptions of Pepe, Steinbeck has suggested a rather strong kinship between Pepe and a snake." Anderson's interpretation of Pepe as exhibiting snake-like traits is, however, too reductive, for it fails to take into account the diversity and suggestiveness of the other animal references in the story. In other words, some of the characteristics Anderson cites seem to be more related to animal-like behavior generally than to the mannerisms of a snake exclusively. But more will be said about this later.

Animal imagery abounds in "Flight," from the reference in the first sentence to "hissing white waters" of the Pacific Ocean to the "thick hiss" that comes from Pepe's lips as he tries desperately to speak just before he is shot and killed at the end. In characterizing Pepe near the outset, Steinbeck points out his "sharp Indian cheek bones" and his "eagle nose," the latter a suggestive image which serves to establish Pepe's primitive, animal-like nature. Mama Torres, Pepe's mother, likewise uses animal imagery in describing her son's laziness. As she tells Pepe, '''Some lazy cow must have got into thy father's family, else how could I have a son like thee'." And at an earlier tune, while she was pregnant with Pepe, she playfully and simplistically points out to him, '". . . a sneaking lazy coyote came out of the brush and looked at me one day. That must have made thee so'." The coyote mentioned here is, of course, a wild animal, an appropriate reference to highlight Pepe's primitive animalism.

Pepe's animal-like nature is further emphasized by the repetition of his somewhat snake-like appearance (He has a "tall head, pointed at the top."), and also as he throws his big black knife into a redwood post, his wrist, it is noted, "flicked like the head of a snake." This last image, while reinforcing Pepe's quick, seemingly instinctive manner of reacting, should perhaps also be viewed in the broader context in which the snake is a universal emblem of evil. In this context, the snakelike quickness that Pepe displays in this basically carefree activity of knife throwing importantly reflects his impetuous nature and foreshadows the ease with which he succumbs to evil in murdering a man in Monterey. As Steinbeck describes Pepe's rash, seemingly instinctive action during the quarrel scene that leads to the murder, one can see a first-hand manifestation of the youth's latent animalism: ". . . the man started toward Pepe and then the knife—it went almost by itself. It flew, it darted before Pepe knew it." From the apparent noncommittal manner with which Steinbeck recounts Pepe's spontaneous, unthinking action, one may get the distinct impression that the author does not wish to call the reader's attention to the fact that the youth is morally culpable, anymore than any cornered, enraged animal would be under similar perilous circumstances.

Another way of interpreting the snake in the image used to describe Pepe's wrist action when he throws his knife, particularly if one is willing to think in terms of the snake as being poisonous, is to see it as a force potentially destructive to human life. This is especially true when the snake senses his security is in jeopardy. After all, a snake, whether it be poisonous or not, will, by its very nature, usually attack potentially threatening elements that come within its striking range. And in fact this is almost precisely what Pepe, who exhibits snakelike traits, seems to do in Monterey in the fatal quarrel scene. In this scene, which Pepe himself describes to his mother after the fact, he strikes out to defend himself when, in the kitchen of Mrs. Rodriquez, a man, whom he senses to be his adversary, starts toward him in anger, threatening his security. Thus the affinity between the quick movement of Pepe's wrist and the defensive reaction of a distracted snake becomes functionally appropriate in the quarrel scene for defining another significant facet of Pepe's character.

There are other animal references in the first part of the story that accent Pepe's primitive animalism. When Mama Torres orders Pepe to go to Monterey to have the medicine bottle refilled, she calls him a "big sheep," which by conventional association can be interpreted as an established symbol of primitive, gentle innocence (the lamb being a universal symbol of innocence). Yet, in retrospect, this reference becomes ironic, for Pepe's nature, as his murderous behavior forthrightly demonstrates, is not that of any submissive domesticated farm animal but rather that of a wild beast. Also, before he begins his journey to the town, Mama Torres calls him a "big coyote,'' that will probably sit, she tells him, in the church in Monterey, "flapping . . . [his] mouth over Aves all day while . . . [he] looked at the candles and the holy pictures." The coyote reference here seems to take on a different meaning from that discussed previously. Initially, it should be remembered, Mama Torres had seen the appearance of a coyote as a sign prefiguring Pepe's laziness. In this later scene, however, the coyote Mama Torres uses to characterize her son suggests Pepe's primitive animalism as reflected in the fact that he has been conditioned to respond through very basic, repetitive, mechanical behavioral patterns—which in this instance are evidenced in prayer by rote. Finally, just before Pepe, who claims at this time to be a man, departs, Mama Torres—who is not as convinced of Pepe's manhood as he himself is—calls him a "foolish chicken," an apt and degrading metaphor to designate Pepe's weakness, instability, and immaturity. Dubbed a sheep, a cow, and then a chicken, Pepe, at least in his mother's eyes, is, at this stage of his innocent life, much like a domesticated farm animal that needs to be fed, sheltered, and generally watched over by others.

The sheep reference is reintroduced soon after Pepe's departure for Monterey in the descnption of Emilio and Rosy, his younger brother and sister who remain at home in the relatively safe, secluded environment of their farm home, sleeping, we are told, in boxes "full of straw and sheepskins." This reference to sheepskins is thematically functional as a counterpoint, for it serves to recall by symbolic association the primitive, innocent, and largely protected environment which the boy Pepe has left. As far as we know Mama Torres does not tell Emilio and Rosy specifically why Pepe will have to flee to the mountains after his return from Monterey, and if this conjecture is correct then most of the animal references which have been employed up to this point in describing Pepe, who as a carefree and lazy youth remained on the farm, reinforce the notion of the Torres' home as a place mainly of sheltered innocence. Yet this innocence, Steinbeck implies, is only for children.

The second part of the story which focuses on Pepe's flight to the mountains in an effort to escape his mysterious pursuers also contains numerous suggestive animal references. In fact, an important pattern emerges here when late on the first day of his flight, Pepe moves farther and farther away from sheltered domesticity into the unpredictable and unprotected realm of primitive nature. As Pepe's horse makes his way slowly and cautiously along a steep mountain trail of broken rock, it is pointed out that lizards "scampered away into the brush as the horse rattled over the little stones." This seemingly incidental event may actually be viewed as a microcosm of Pepe's repeated response to his predicament: that is, the lizards flee the potential and uncertain danger of the large and intruding horse as Pepe himself flees his inimical pursuers.

This pattern of using animals to accent Pepe's flight is repeated several other times. As Pepe's horse continues to proceed along the trail, the sound of his hooves also frightens vigilant birds and rabbits that sense the danger. Moreover, on the evening of the first day of Pepe's flight, doves and quail that gather near a spring are stalked by a wildcat that "was creeping toward the spring, belly to the ground . . .". This situation, like the two previously cited, parallels Pepe's own and provides another illustration of withdrawal from danger as fitting behavior when the circumstances of survival depend on man's ability to resort to strategies of primitive animalism. And finally on the night of the first day, the pursuit and flight pattern is further illustrated when the owls hunt the slopes, looking for rabbits. This incident like the others recreates through remarkably similar animal actions the tremendous fear and tension that Pepe's flight from danger has caused him. In short, the similarly patterned behavior of the animals in this series of scenes serves to reinforce quite blatantly the primitive animalism of Pepe Torres.

As Pepe progresses farther into the mountains, an environment of uncertainty and hostility, he seems to feel even more compelled to act in the manner of a hunted wild beast. When his horse is shot by one of his pursuers, Pepe, Steinbeck observes in the scene that follows, moves with the "instinctive care of an animal," "worming" and "wriggling" his way to safety behind a rock. The point Steinbeck seems to be making here is certainly not vague, for he emphasizes it throughout the story—namely, the naturalistic view that man must resort to behaving like a brute animal in his struggle to survive. Even though Pepe spots a single eagle flying overhead, free and unencumbered, just before his horse is shot, this eagle becomes ironic when viewed in retrospect and within the context of Pepe's own greatly restricted and reduced mobility, the result of the untimely loss of his horse and a painful, near maiming injury to his right hand.

Other animal references also serve a functional thematic purpose during the period of Pepe's flight. In fact, it might be argued that nearly every successive animal image becomes more threatening and sinister than the ones that preceded it. Soon after the injury to his hand, Pepe views a number of wild animals in the following order of appearance: a small brown bird, a high-soaring eagle that "stepped daintily out on the trail and crossed it and disappeared mto the brush again," a brown doe, a rattlesnake, grey lizards, a "big tawny mountain lion," that sits watching him, and last circling black birds, presumably buzzards, a universal portentous sign of disaster, in this case Pepe's own approaching death.

It is curious and perhaps significant to note that Pepe displays an almost animal-like cautiousness and vigilance during this time. Though he crawls very near to a rattlesnake before actually seeing it, he, nevertheless, manages to avoid its deadly fangs (unlike his father, who tripped over a stone and fell on a rattlesnake which fatally bit him). Though the grey lizards may not be as formidable a threat as a poisonous rattlesnake, still Pepe, in his animal-like urge to survive, does not want to take any chances and consequently crushes one of these unsuspecting lizards with a stone as it creeps near him. Interestingly, this action seems to anticipate Pepe's own sudden destruction at the end of the story. The mountain lion, the largest and possibly the most dangerous of the animals Pepe observes during his ordeal, watches Pepe for a long time and in turn is viewed by Pepe at a safe distance before it finally slinks away into the thick brush.

Just after the lion departs, Pepe, hearing the sounds of horses' hooves pounding loudly on the rocks and the sharp yelp of a dog, and sensing danger to be near, instinctively glides quickly into a nearby brush "almost as quietly as the lion had" and then crouches "up the hill toward the next ridge," where he stays until dark. Pepe's withdrawal for self-preservation and the emphasis on his distinct crawling and crouching movements aptly complement his many other previously observed animal-like mannerisms. Then, a short time later, when greatly bothered by the excruciating pain in his infected arm and very much dismayed by having carelessly lost his gun, Pepe, whose state again resembles that of a wild animal, climbs to the top of a ridge "with the effort of a hurt beast." And finding he cannot speak, the only sound that he utters from his lips is an unintelligible hissing noise, an utterance that is another striking manifestation of his transformation into animalism, a sound, moreover, that he repeats on the next day, the final day of his life, when he realizes that his pursuers (he hears the "crying yelp" of their hounds) are still following his trail.

In observing Pepe's hissing and crawling and several other of his mannerisms, one may be inclined to accept the view of Hilton Anderson, cited previously, that Steinbeck seems to be consciously emphasizing close affinities between Pepe and a snake. To draw such a connection seems quite logical, except that Anderson tries to push his analogy too far outside the bounds of reasonable credibility. When Pepe crosses himself with his left hand just before the start of the final scene in the story, Anderson, recalling the always readily accessible Edenic myth, sees Pepe's action as an exorcism of his "serpent qualities." This observation, though ingenious, is not entirely accurate, however; for as noted earlier in this essay, Pepe is portrayed in the last section of the story as exhibiting several other animal-like traits, such as the dog-like whine he makes when he scrapes his infected arm with a sharp stone or his withdrawing into the brush as the mountain lion had done, neither of which relates to the snake analogy or to the Edenic archetype.

Furthermore, though Pepe Torres stands erect, apparently transcending his animalism in exhibiting some degree of manliness at the story's conclusion, the sense of his fall or loss must not be interpreted exclusively within the limited context of the Edenic myth but in the more general sense of a human being's loss of youthful innocence as represented here in Pepe's death.

The final animal reference that should be commented on is the circling, scavenging buzzards, a foreboding reminder that the end of Pepe's flight is inevitable death. As the ending of "Flight" clearly indicates, Pepe can flee no farther (He finally reaches the top of the big rock on the ridge's peak), and importantly his subsequent stoicism and courage, reliable indicators of his maturity, reveal he realizes this: "Once there, he arose slowly, swaying to his feet, and stood erect"—this time as a man, but a man on the verge of losing the precious sense of living he has only recently acquired through the dual acts of murder and the ordeal of flight.

Thus in "Flight," as I have attempted to demonstrate, there are a significant number of animal references which seem to function either to define features of Pepe Torres' character or to accent some of the physical challenges he experiences during his flight for survival and the resulting psychological traumas of this ordeal. One set of these references establishes a readily discernible pattern wherein before his journey to Monterey Pepe's innocence is complemented through descriptions of selected domestic farm animals while later his frenzied flight, which, as we have seen, becomes a jungle-like struggle for survival, is complemented through descriptions of wild, potentially dangerous animals. In the mannerisms of these wild, predatory animals, moreover, a second pattern emerges as they become imposing threats to weaker, smaller animals, which at the sign of danger are compelled to withdraw to safety. This pattern, it should be noted, can be conveniently viewed as a close parallel to Pepe's own precarious predicament after he commits murder in Monterey. In addition, there are references in which animals seem to be consciously employed as ominous signs, prefiguring Pepe's inevitable doom. Viewed within the context of the story, then, the various animal references and the patterns they form give "Flight'' a richly suggestive texture that is often characteristic of some of the more artistically impressive short stories of twentieth-century literature.

Source: Edward J. Piacentino, "Patterns of Ammal Imagery in Steinbeck's 'Flight'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol 17, No 4, Fall, 1980, pp. 437-43. Piacentino is an Associate Professor of English at High Point College.

Critics have generally agreed with Peter Lisca's contention [in The Wide World of John Steinbeck, 1958] that "Flight" describes "the growth of a boy to manhood and the meaning of that manhood," thereby identifying Pepe Torres' experience with that of Huck Finn, Henry Fleming, George Willard, and Eugene Gant in one of the most familiar intellectual odysseys in American literature. I should like to suggest, however, that Steinbeck's short story is not really in the Bildungsroman tradition at all; for rather than depicting the spiritual evolution of an adolescent developing and struggling toward manhood, the story, I think, portrays just the opposite—man's moral deterioration and regression that inevitably results when he abandons responsibility for his actions. Pepe, then, begins as a child and becomes by running away less than an animal rather than a man.

Steinbeck's parable of crime and punishment is not vitally concerned with either but merely employs the archetypal pattern of the chase as a framework for psychological delineation of character. Steinbeck, for instance, never explicitly tells us that Pepe did kill his victim, nor do we know the specific circumstances out of which the crime evolved. What is important in "Flight'' is not the crime itself but Pepe's mental and physical response to it, how he deports himself when the circumstances are propitious for a boy to become a man. It is true that Pepe, his mother, brother, and sister all think that his drunken quarrel in Mrs. Rodriguez' kitchen initiates him into manhood. Mrs. Torres even says in this connection, "Pepe goes on a journey. Pepe is a man now." But it is patently evident that Steinbeck does not accept this primitive ethic, for at no time thereafter does he portray Pepe as an adult with any of the duties, obligations, or responsibilities that adulthood implies. Nor does Steinbeck show any growth or intellectual change in his protagonist—no enlightenment, no increased perception of his world—which normally accompany the process of growing up. Indeed, we can measure Pepe's intellectual, physical, and moral deterioration from that night when he returns from Monterey to tell his mother of his decision to escape retribution for his crime by fleeing into the mountains.

Steinbeck attempts to illustrate this deterioration on the symbolic as well as the narrative level and incorporates into his story several objects associated with Pepe's father—the long, black-handled knife, the black coat, and the saddle. It is significant that each of these symbols of adulthood is lost or abandoned in Pepe's flight from responsibility. Dan Vogel interprets this as a divesting of the artifacts of the father because the youth, now a man and able to stand alone, no longer needs them. But is not the point here precisely that Pepe is not able to stand alone? Does he not sorely need these objects to survive, their loss putting him at the mercy of a hostile environment that makes of him more a thing than an adult?

Also supporting this view of Pepe's flight is its structure, which is oriented around the two-stage dehumanization of the protagonist, first from boy to animal, then from animal to inanimate part of nature, an indistinguishable part of the barren landscape. Pepe begins the first stage of his regression by shunning humankind in his avoidance of the red-cheeked fat man on the trail, then by later losing the outer trappings (his hat and the tear in his jeans) that distinguish him from the animals. When his horse is shot, he is forced to walk, then crawl, then wriggle forward on his stomach. Steinbeck describes him at this point as moving "with the instinctive care of an animal."

The second stage of his retrogression, his progressive identification with a physical waste land that symbolizes his increasing moral and spiritual degeneration, begins when one of the posse's bullets slivers a piece of granite that pierces Pepe's hand. At this point Pepe becomes one with the setting of the story. Here the union is only temporary, and he is able to remove the sliver of stone from his hand. In order to stop the bleeding, however, he gathers spider webs on two occasions and presses them into his wound. Later, in order to assuage his thirst, he eats mud; and as he retreats further, those faculties which separate man from lower forms of nature disappear, and Pepe loses the power of speech, his tongue being unable to articulate words and giving rise to hissing sounds only. The final degradation takes place when after being struck by two bullets, he rolls down a hill, starting a small avalanche that covers only his head, an action symbolic of the obliteration of all reasoning powers. The identification with nature and the journey from manhood and its compelling responsibilities are complete!

Source: Walter K Gordon, "Steinbeck's 'Flight': Journey to or from Maturity?" in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol 3, No. 4, Summer, 1966, pp 453-55 Gordon is affiliated with Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

More than a mere allegory, "Flight" reveals characteristics of myth and tragedy. A myth is a story that tries to explain some practice, belief, institution, or natural phenomenon, and is especially associated with religious rites and beliefs. The natural phenomenon, for Steinbeck, is not the facts of nature, with which historical myths deal; rather, it is . . . the development of innocent childhood into disillusioned manhood. The myth that Steinbeck wrought also contains another quality of myth, the rite. The plot of "Flight" narrates symbolically the ritual: the escape from the Mother, the divestiture of the Father, and the death and burial of Childhood. To discern these mythic symbols, it is necessary to review the narrative facts.

At the beginning of the story, Pepe, though 19 years of age, has all the innocence of the "toy-baby" his mother calls him. . . .

When his rather domineering mother—who constantly taunts him with his inability to be "a man"—asks him to go to Monterey, "a revolution took place in the relaxed figure of Pepe.". . . He is asked, surprisingly, to go alone; he is permitted to wear his father's hat and his father's hatband and to ride in his father's saddle. . . .

When Pepe returns, he has killed a man with his father's knife, left behind him at the scene of the crime. The look of innocence is gone; he has been shocked by a fact of life, an extreme independent act. His mother quickly understands and helps him outfit himself for the flight into the mountains. She gives him especially his father's black coat and rifle. Weighted down by the accoutrements of his father, Pepe separates himself from his mother. She recognizes the change. She tells the little boy, "Pepe is a man now. He has a man's thing to do." . . . Logically, however, this is not necessarily so. A man might possibly have been expected to give himself up and pay for his crime. It seems to me, then, that Pepe's mother perceived that her son is entering manhood and must stand alone. This he must do.

The ordeal of transformation from innocence to experience, from purity to defilement begins. There is the physical pain of the ordeal, symbolized by a cut hand that soon becomes gangrenous. There is the psychological pain—the recognition of a strangeness in this life that is omnipresent, silent, watchful and dark—the sense of Evil, or Tragedy or Retribution. This realization is symbolized by the narratively gratuitous, unrealistic presence of the black figures, the "dark watchers'' who are seen for a moment on the tops of ridges and then disappear. . . . These are the silent inscrutable watchers from above, the universal Nemesis, the recognition of which signals a further step into manhood. . . .

Only [when] having been separated from his mother and having cleansed himself of all the accoutrements and artifacts of his father, can the youth stand alone. But to Steinbeck this is far from a joyous or victorious occasion. It is sad and painful and tragic. Pepe rises to his feet, "black against the morning sky," . . . astride a ridge. He is a perfect target and the narrative ends with the man against the sky shot down. The body rolls down the hillside, creating a little avalanche, which follows him in his descent and covers up his head. Thus innocence is killed and buried in the moment that Man stands alone.

Thus the myth ends, as so many myths do, with violence and melodrama. What the myth described is the natural miracle of entering manhood. When serenity of childhood is lost, there is pain and misery. Yet there is nevertheless a sense of gain and heroism which are more interesting and dramatic. It is a story that has fascinated many from [William] Wordsworth to [Ernest] Hemingway, and what Steinbeck has written is a myth that describes in symbols what has happened to each of us.

Source: Dan Vogel, "Steinbeck's 'Flight': The Myth of Manhood," in College English, Vol. 23, No. 3, December, 1961, pp 225-26. Vogel is chairman of the Department of English at the Jerusalem College for Women in Israel. He is the author of The Three Masks of American Tragedy (1974) and a critical biography of poet Emma Lazarus.