SOURCE: Shaw, Patrick W. “Steinbeck's The Red Pony (1945).” In A New Study Guide to Steinbeck's Major Works, with Critical Explications, edited by Tetsumaro Hayashi, pp. 186-205. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1993.

[In the following essay, Shaw relates the origins and offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of the four stories that comprise The Red Pony.]

I. BACKGROUND

The Red Pony consists of four short stories, each originally published independently over a period of approximately five years. “The Gift,” which tells of the red pony, was published in the North American Review in November 1933. “The Great Mountains” was published in the same journal the following month. The third story, “The Promise,” was published in Harper's magazine in October 1937. “The Leader of the People” was not published in America until 1938, in The Long Valley, a collection of Steinbeck's short stories. It had previously been published in the English magazine Argosy in August 1936. The four stories were brought together as a novella in 1945, when they were published as The Red Pony in a special illustrated edition. All four of the stories, however, were written in the early 1930s. Steinbeck also wrote a movie script for The Red Pony—significantly different from the short novel—which was produced in 1949.

The “pony story,” as Steinbeck called it, was written under rather unusual circumstances, beginning in the spring of 1933. In the early 1930s the entire country was in the midst of the Depression, and Steinbeck himself was not yet famous and had little money. He was much influenced by the biologist Ed Ricketts and was developing a serious interest in biology. His mother was dying, and he and his wife Carol moved back to the family home in Salinas, California, to help care for her. The letters he wrote as The Red Pony was taking shape offer an excellent account of its composition. Steinbeck was trying to come to terms, as he says, with the fact that “Half of the cell units of my mother's body have rebelled.”¹ Because of his mother's incontinence, Steinbeck personally had to change her bedclothes. “There are terrible washings [of 9-12 sheets] every day. … I wash them and Carol irons them” (82). The pony story which he began was based loosely upon his own childhood experience with a sick pony. Writing on a dining-room table just outside his mother's sick-room door, Steinbeck would compose a few lines or a paragraph, then be interrupted to go empty her bedpan or change her sheets (83). Contemplating his mother's death and the experiences surrounding it, he tried to “sneak in a little work” (82) and to put events “into the symbolism of fiction” (76). In a letter written in June 1933, he refers to the experience as “a very long siege” that could “last for years,” and a “sentence” which he could not leave (78). He longed for time to spend a few hours at the beach or to go camping with friends.

Confined to home by his mother's paralysis, Steinbeck began to form a thesis of life itself—a thesis that “takes in all life, and for that part, all matter” (79). Steinbeck tried to explain his thinking to a friend:

A further arrangement of cells and a very complex one may make a unit which we call a man. That has been our final unit. But there have been mysterious things which could not be explained if man is the final unit. He also arranges himself into larger units, which I have called the phalanx. The phalanx has its own memory—memory of the great tides when the moon was close, memory of starvation when the food of the world was exhausted. Memory of methods when numbers of his units had to be destroyed for the good of the whole, memory of the history of itself.

(79-80)

Elucidating his theory in another letter, Steinbeck noted that “the group is an individual as boundaried, as diagnosable, as dependent on its units and as independent of its units' individual natures, as the human unit, or man, is dependent on his cells and yet is independent of them” (75). Steinbeck realized his theory was not without its faults, explaining that he was “neither scientist nor profound investigator,” and that he was trying to understand his mother's dying in terms of a “tremendous and terrible poetry” (81).

As the months wore on, Steinbeck's father also began to break under the strain; and Steinbeck worried that his father would end up “in the same position as my mother” (88). The elder Steinbeck lost his eyesight, and was “like an engine” shaking “itself to pieces” (88). “Death,” Steinbeck wrote, “I can stand but not this slow torture wherein a good and a strong man tears off little shreds of himself and throws them away” (89). On top of all this, Steinbeck's dog Tillie died and was replaced by another dog named “Joddi” (87-88)—a name similar to that he gave the boy protagonist of The Red Pony. As his biographer Jackson J. Benson writes, “Writing had always been in part for [Steinbeck] an escape; now escape became a way of surviving.”²

Under such circumstances, Steinbeck wrote “The Gift” and “The Great Mountains.” His mother died shortly after Christmas 1933, and in the early spring of 1934 Steinbeck wrote “The Promise” and “The Leader of the People,” which would eventually serve as the final stories for The Red Pony.

II. PLOT SYNOPSIS

The Red Pony consists of four stories: “The Gift,” “The Great Mountains,” “The Promise,” and “The Leader of the People.” The setting for each of the stories is the Carl Tiflin ranch, near Salinas, California. In addition to the usual house and outbuildings, prominent landmarks on the ranch are a cold water spring and a great black kettle under a cypress tree. Here pigs are killed and scalded. No definite dates are given in the stories, but certain details such as the lack of electricity and the absence of motorized vehicles suggest the early twentieth century. The events of all four stories cover approximately two and one-half years, beginning in the summer of Jody's tenth year, but the sequence in which the stories appear may not be the same sequence in which the events of Jody Tiflin's life occur.

Jody Tiflin is an obedient little boy, “with hair like dusty yellow grass” and “shy polite gray eyes.”³ Billy Buck, the middle-aged ranch hand, is “a broad, bandy-legged little man” whose eyes are “watery gray” and whose hair protrudes from beneath his Stetson hat like spikes (137). Carl Tiflin is a “disciplinarian” and a “tall stern father” (138). Mrs. Tiflin is given no specific description, and is referred to only once as “Ruth.”

I. “THE GIFT”

Jody returns home from school one day to discover that his father and Billy Buck have brought him a red pony colt and a red leather saddle back from their trip to Salinas. He is very excited about the pony and is admired and envied by his school-mates, who know “instinctively that a man on a horse is spiritually as well as physically bigger than a man on foot” (143). He names the pony “Gabilan,” which means “hawk” and which is also the name of the nearby mountains. In the ensuing months Jody is diligent in caring for and training the pony, with Billy Buck's guidance. Seeing the progress his son has made with the pony, Mr. Tiflin promises him he can ride Gabilan by Thanksgiving, three weeks away. Jody worries about how ashamed of him everybody will be if he does not ride well.

Before Thanksgiving, the weather turns cold and rainy. Jody is careful to make sure Gabilan is kept dry in his stall. When the sun returns, Billy Buck assures Jody that he can safely leave Gabilan out in the corral during the school day. He promises Jody he will watch Gabilan and put him back in the barn if the rain should return. While Jody is at school, the rain returns, and though Jody wants to run home to check his pony, he is afraid of doing so because of the punishment he knows he would receive for leaving school. After school he hurries home to “see Gabilan standing miserably in the corral” (150), cold and wet. He accuses Billy Buck of being wrong about his assurance that it would not rain, and Billy feels guilty.

Despite all of Billy's efforts to help Gabilan, the colt gets worse. His “eyes were half closed” and “thin fluid ran from his nostrils” (152). A large lump forms under his jaw, a sign of “strangles,” and Billy Buck must slash it open with a knife to keep the colt from suffocating. During the night the wind and rain return, and Jody runs to the barn to find that the colt has once again left his stall and wandered out into the storm. This time Billy Buck has “to open a little hole” in Gabilan's windpipe to allow him to breathe. Jody watches as the “blood ran thickly out and up the knife and across Billy's hand” (157).

At daylight Jody awakens to find that the barn door has swung open and that the pony is gone once again. He easily tracks Gabilan through “the frostlike dew on the young grass” (158). A buzzard is sitting “on the pony's head and its beak had just risen dripping with dark eye fluid” (159). Jody grabs the bird and smashes its head with a piece of white quartz rock, but not before the buzzard vomits “putrefied fluid” (159). Billy Buck and Carl Tiflin find Jody by the pony, and his father asks him if he knows that “the buzzard didn't kill the pony” (159). Billy Buck lifts Jody to carry him home, looking back at Carl Tiflin to say “'Course he knows it. … Jesus Christ! man, can't you see how he'd feel about it?” (160).

II. “THE GREAT MOUNTAINS”

It is midsummer and Jody destroys swallow nests, sets rat traps so the ranch dogs will get their noses snapped, and kills a thrush with his slingshot. After beheading and disemboweling the bird, he washes the blood from his hands in the tub filled by the spring. Then he thinks about the mountains in the distance and how little he knows about them. He remembers asking his father what lies between the mountains and the ocean which is on the other side. Though his father tells him “nothing,” Jody knows “something was there, something very wonderful” (162). Yet he is afraid of the “terrible” mountains. Turning to face the east, he then sees the Gabilans, which are “jolly mountains, with hill ranches in their creases” (162). He remembers that “battles had been fought against the Mexicans on the slopes” (162).

Jody returns to the house just as a bony old man dressed in worn cowboy clothing arrives. “I am Gitano,” he tells Jody, “and I have come back” (163). Jody runs to get his mother, and Gitano then explains to them that he was born in an old adobe house on the ranch and that he has returned to stay until he dies. Jody then gets his father from the barn, and Carl Tiflin tells the old man that he cannot stay and will have to leave tomorrow.

Jody shows Gitano to the bunkhouse, and finally gets up enough nerve to ask him if he is from the “big mountains.” The old man tells him he has been in the mountains only once, when he was a little boy accompanied by his father. He tells Jody he cannot remember what was there. “I think it was quiet—I think it was nice,” he tells Jody (166).

Among the horses on the ranch is one with yellow teeth, protruding rib bones, and painful movements. Jody explains to Gitano that it is old Easter, the first horse his father ever had. Jody's father says that such old things should be shot and put out of their misery. Billy Buck tells him that after having worked all their lives, animals should be allowed to rest and “just walk around” (167). Jody realizes that Carl Tiflin is “probing for a place to hurt in Gitano” (167). After Carl Tiflin and Billy Buck leave, Jody apologizes to the old man, while Easter lets Gitano rub his neck and mane.

That night after supper Jody returns to the bunkhouse to find Gitano holding a “lovely rapier with a golden basket hilt” (169). Gitano is angry at the intrusion and will not let the boy examine the sword. He will only tell Jody that he got it from his father. Leaving the bunkhouse, Jody realizes that he “must never tell anyone about the rapier” because to do so would “destroy some fragile structure of truth” (170).

Next morning Jody arises to learn that both Gitano and old Easter have disappeared. Later, a neighbor, Jess Taylor, informs the Tiflins that early that morning he saw an old man riding an old horse without a saddle, and holding something shiny like a gun in his hand. He was headed into the mountains. Carl Tiflin tells the neighbor that Gitano's stealing the old horse will just save him the cost of having to bury it. Jody thinks about the towering mountains, the rapier, and old Gitano. He lies down in the “green grass near the round tub” at the spring, filled with longing and a “nameless sorrow” (171).

III. “THE PROMISE”

Jody is returning from school one spring day, pretending to lead an army and collecting grasshoppers and other creatures. When he reaches home, his mother informs him that his father is waiting to see him. Fearing punishment for some misdeed, Jody goes to find his father in the pasture. Carl Tiflin tells Jody that he can take the mare Nellie to a neighbor's ranch to be bred, if he will accept responsibility for her and the colt she will throw, and if he will work off the ＄5.00 stud fee. Though his insides are “shriveling,” Jody calmly tells his father that he will accept the responsibility. That evening, with bats and nighthawks flying about, Billy Buck explains to Jody that it will take nearly a year before the colt is born. Jody promises he will not get tired of waiting. Next morning he takes Nellie to be bred and is almost killed when the stallion Sun Dog breaks loose and charges down the hill to meet Nellie.

Jody wants Billy Buck to promise that he will not let anything happen to Nellie's colt, but Billy remembers the red pony and says that he cannot promise anything. Jody often goes to the spring, to think and be soothed. But he thinks also of the pigs that are slaughtered near the black cypress tree and scalded in the black pot.

Christmas passes. Then January. By February, Nellie still has not given birth. Finally, Jody is awakened one night by Billy Buck, telling him the colt is about to be born. They run to the barn to find Nellie “standing rigid and stiff” (185). Realizing something is wrong, Billy Buck takes a horseshoe hammer and crushes Nellie's skull. He then cuts her stomach open with a pocket knife, plunges his hands into the hole, and drags out “a big, white, dripping bundle” (186). With his teeth he tears open the birth sac and lays a black colt at Jody's feet. “There's your colt,” Billy says. “I promised. And there it is” (186). Leaving the barn to get water which Billy has demanded, Jody tries to be happy, but “the haunted, tired eyes of Billy Buck hung in the air ahead of him” (186).

IV. “THE LEADER OF THE PEOPLE”

Billy Buck is raking the last of the old year's hay. Jody is interested in the mice that live in the haystacks and vows that he will now kill “those damn mice” (188). Billy warns him that he must first get his father's permission. Carl Tiflin returns home on horseback, carrying a letter from Mrs. Tiflin's father which says he will arrive today for a short visit. Carl Tiflin is not pleased with the news, complaining that all the old man can talk about is Indians. Mrs. Tiflin is at first angry with her husband's attitude, but then quietly explains that her father's leading a wagon train “clear across the plains to the coast” was the “big thing” in his life and after he had done it, there was nothing left for him to do (189).

Jody, who is excited by his grandfather's visit, goes out to meet the “old man,” who is dressed in black and has a white beard and “sternly merry” blue eyes (191), and he arrives in a horse-drawn cart. Jody announces that he is going on a mouse hunt tomorrow and asks Grandfather to come with him. “Have the people of this generation come down to hunting mice?” Grandfather chuckles. He says that in the past when “the troops were hunting Indians and shooting children and burning teepees” it was like a mouse hunt (192). Billy Buck comes out of the bunkhouse to meet them, for he holds Grandfather “in reverence” (193). Grandfather knew Billy's father, Mule-tail Buck, a man whom he respected. At dinner, Grandfather begins to retell his frontier stories, and Carl Tiflin reminds him that everyone at the table has heard them “lots of times.” Jody knows how his grandfather feels “collapsed and empty” inside, and encourages him to continue his Indian stories (194). Billy Buck, Carl Tiflin, and Mrs. Tiflin sit at the table but do not listen.

Jody gets permission from his father to kill the mice the next day, then goes to bed and thinks of his Grandfather on a huge white horse, “living in the heroic time” (196). He arises next morning eager to kill the mice, but at breakfast Grandfather overhears Carl Tiflin complain about having to hear Grandfather's tales “over and over” (197). Carl Tiflin apologizes, but Grandfather tells him that he is probably right. Jody is no longer interested in killing the mice, but sits instead on the porch with Grandfather. Grandfather explains to Jody that he feels that the crossing was not worth doing. It was not getting to the coast that mattered, he says. The important thing was “movement and westering” (199). Now, he says, “There's a line of old men along the shore hating the ocean because it stopped them” (199). Westering is done, and there is no place left to go. Jody then offers to make Grandfather a glass of lemonade, but when his mother asks if he wants one for himself, he declines.

III. CRITICAL EXPLICATION

As most previous analyses recognize, the stories which comprise The Red Pony detail Jody Tiflin's initiation into death and his awakening to the need for human compassion. As R. S. Hughes phrases it, “Steinbeck focuses on the progress of Jody's initiation into the reality of death” by objectively presenting “graphic descriptions of suffering, violence, and death.”⁴ This initiation is a fundamental and significant element in the stories, but Steinbeck seemed to have most in mind an experiment in point of view. He describes his intent during the early stages of writing The Red Pony:

It is a very simple story about a boy who gets a colt pony and the pony gets distemper. There is a good deal in it, first about the training of horses and second about the treatment of distemper. This may not seem like a good basis for a story but that entirely depends upon the treatment. The whole thing is as simply told as though it came out of the boy's mind although there is no going into the boy's mind. It is an attempt to make the reader create the boy's mind for himself.

(SLL, 71)

In my analysis of The Red Pony, I will focus upon the interrelationships among the initiation motif, the point of view that tries to “make the reader create” Jody's mind, and Steinbeck's characteristic use of symbols.

Howard Levant is correct in noting that whereas the “objective events” of the story “are self-contained,” they are presented to the reader through Jody's “innocent point of view.” Levant goes on to explain that “each episode begins with a focus on Jody's childish faith in adults or a child's world.” In this process, “death and imperfection are everywhere” and “nature is a merely neutral element.”⁵ It is important for us to keep in mind that while the story is not presented from the first person point of view, the narrative focus is indeed upon Jody, for it is through his experiences that we as readers must form our evaluation of the various narratives that make up The Red Pony. Moreover, recognizing that Jody is indeed a child forced to cope with life in an exclusively adult environment which is frequently narrow and unfriendly is important to our understanding of Steinbeck's intent. Brian Barbour correctly anticipates this conflict when he notes that Jody's father personifies cruelty, inhumanity, and a near total lack of compassion.⁶

A reader unfamiliar with The Red Pony may come to it expecting to find a children's tale or a story of pastoral innocence. The title suggests the happy story of a boy who gets his heart's desire, a pony. This tone of innocent contentment is continued in the first two paragraphs of the story, with Billy Buck's taking care of the animals, the mother's call to food and warmth of the breakfast table, the summer weather, and Jody's carefree obedience. From such a beginning a reader may well anticipate a nostalgic, escapist account of “good” actions set in a past era. Such benign expectations are soon negated, however, and the contrast between what the title and opening paragraphs may connote and what Steinbeck actually describes is a major element in the impact which The Red Pony has upon us as audience. Far from a happy tale of innocent experiences on a western ranch, Steinbeck gives us what superficially seems to be an unrelieved account of disappointments, meanness, and death. There is nothing idyllic about any of the four stories. Only in the subtext of the narrative can we discover the philosophical positives which counterbalance the textual negatives.

What Steinbeck gives us in the narrative context of the stories is the objective account of a ten-year-old boy who is being reared in geographical and psychological isolation. That is, Jody is physically isolated on a ranch in the Salinas Valley of California and psychologically isolated in that he has no contact with the cosmopolitan world of cities and large numbers of people. His only contact with the world off the ranch is at his school, and Steinbeck only briefly mentions this part of Jody's life, thus suggesting its relative insignificance in the formation of Jody's responses to the world. The lessons Jody learns are from life, not from books. The distance of other families or neighbors is indicated when Jody takes Nellie to be bred and has to walk steadily for an hour before reaching the road that leads to Jess Taylor's ranch. Having no brothers or sisters, and having only brief contact with his schoolmates, Jody is surrounded by adults—isolated, that is, in a world that is psychologically “foreign.” Within the space of a relatively short period of time, he is forced to deal with the realities of sexuality (epitomized by the breeding frenzy of the horses); with human cruelty (his father's harsh treatment of Jody's grandfather and Gitano); and death (the red pony and Nellie). As a child, therefore, he is a kind of stranger in a strange land of adults and adult problems. That the final scene in the short novel shows Jody acting with loving kindness toward his aging grandfather does not prove that he has transcended these problems, but it does suggest that Jody is preparing to enter his own adulthood with more understanding and compassion than the adults with whom he has been reared.

In light of Jody's compassion, we need also to note the dominance of the “male” attitudes in Jody's life—attitudes which too often seem coldly pragmatic and lacking in compassion. We see this masculine hardness in both Carl Tiflin and Billy Buck. Though Jody's father is capable of giving and of parental love, he seems more prone to squelch those emotions. As the narrator of the story says, “Carl Tiflin hated weakness and sickness, and he held a violent contempt for helplessness” (151). Moreover, his harsh, sarcastic condemnation of Jody's grandfather in “The Leader of the People” shows a meanness of spirit which few readers can condone. The ranch hand Billy Buck is less prone to such hard treatment of others than is his boss, but he, too, is ultimately hard and practical. His devoted nurturing of the sick colt Gabilan is ironically counterbalanced by his bloody killing of the mare Nellie to save the second colt. Billy well knows that he can save the mare by “tear[ing] the colt to pieces to get it out” (178), but he chooses instead to save the colt and sacrifice the mare. That this colt is male, as shown by the masculine pronouns Billy uses (186), and that Billy does not hesitate to kill the mare to save it symbolize the dominance of the male in the value system which determines the rural life in which Jody must mature. Further, practically all the male characters in the novella are conspicuously named (Billy Buck, Carl Tiflin, Gitano, Jody Tiflin), but the only human female in the novel (Jody's mother) is identified almost exclusively as “Mrs. Tiflin” or “his mother.” Such a naming device suggests her subservience to her husband and to the male patriarchy in general, and significantly emphasizes her lack of individual identity. Even her displeasure at Carl Tiflin's harsh attitude toward her father is implied by gesture, never by direct outspoken opposition, though clearly she has good cause to express her anger at such churlish behavior. In passing, we might note also that her father is a man who does not fit into the hard, pragmatic mold which Carl Tiflin and Billy Buck epitomize. He is a man of compassion and understanding, as shown in his awareness that “hunting Indians and shooting children and burning teepees” shows a lack of human love like the pointless killing of mice (192). And similar to his daughter in the story, he is given no specific identification. He is designated only as “Grandfather.”

Jody must choose between this masculine, pragmatic hardness and the compassionate nurturing usually identified as feminine. We are never told of Jody's choices overtly in the story, for as I have noted, the style remains predominantly objective and non-judgmental; and the overall tone reflects the same hard pragmaticism we have associated with the masculine world of the ranch. That is, Steinbeck passes no substantive judgments against the male attitudes which are part of a pattern of behavior adopted to cope with a nature that is often violent, bloody, and unforgiving. As Steinbeck himself has pointed out, he never takes us inside Jody's mind. Yet, rather subtly, Steinbeck's management of the feminine elements in the short novel suggests what the harsh life of the rural ranch can do to an individual: it can render him insensitive to the emotional needs of others and remove him from the nurturing compassion that is important in human relationships if humans are to be anything other than predators and vultures and mere victims to those who are physically stronger. We see this predator-victim life symbolized by the circling buzzards, the quail Jody wants to shoot, the cows and pigs which are slaughtered, and (ironically) in the name “Gabilan,” which means hawk.

That Steinbeck had the conflict of the feminine- masculine sensibilities in mind while writing The Red Pony is substantiated by “The Chrysanthemums,” a short story he published in the same year as “The Promise,” which would become part of The Red Pony. “The Chrysanthemums” focuses upon a woman who is isolated on a Salinas Valley ranch (like Jody) and whose femininity is repressed if not totally destroyed by a male-dominated society. It is probably Steinbeck's best short story and clearly demonstrates his subtle management of the theme of artistic sensibility at odds with a hard, pragmatic world, the same theme we see in The Red Pony when Jody's innocence and innate compassion must confront a world in which such qualities have little value. As John H. Timmerman wisely points out in a footnote to his own comments about “The Chrysanthemums,” it is a mistake “to pass modern liberation theories onto Steinbeck,”⁷ but certainly he was innately, if not consciously, sensitive to the issues arising when any individual is squelched by a prevailing social bias.

Keeping to his objective style and unemotional tone, Steinbeck does not reveal to us which way Jody will go—toward the “stern” hardness of his father and bloody pragmatism of Billy Buck or toward the kinder, more compassionate, and ultimately perhaps more humanitarian way personified by his mother and Grandfather. Yet, as I note above, by the simple fact that Jody decides at the end of “The Leader of the People” to forego the killing of the mice and spend time on the porch with his despondent grandfather, Steinbeck suggests that Jody is moving toward an understanding of the human predicament which neither his father nor Billy Buck has attained. Grandfather's experience during his visit to the Tiflin ranch has taught him that if the life epitomized by Carl Tiflin's attitude is typical of the settlement of the country, then the fight for the land and the crossing of the continent “wasn't worth doing” (199). “Westering,” that dream of adventure and a belief in the unstoppable progress of the human animal (the phalanx as Steinbeck called it), somehow “died out of the people” (199). Grandfather knows the Pacific Ocean halted the dream of the westward migration, and “There's a line of old men along the shore hating the ocean because it stopped them” (199). Yet we as audience, as perhaps will Jody as he further matures, realize that it is only the physical movement that has been halted, the geographical, literal limitations that have been reached. The psychological or emotional “frontiers” are left to be explored, and the ocean which Grandfather sees as a barrier can serve just as easily as a symbol for the limitless mystery of human life that is yet open to exploration. (We recall that Steinbeck himself was nursing his dying mother as he wrote The Red Pony and that with his biologist friend, Ed Ricketts, he would soon set sail to explore the oceans, both literally and symbolically.) John H. Timmerman summarizes The Red Pony in this way: “Working through the major themes of death and renewal, of dreams such as Grandfather's and the confines of civilization upon it, is also the theme of freedom and constraint that especially marks the tension between Carl and Jody Tiflin.”⁸ Timmerman is correct, for indeed Jody quietly insists that he have the freedom to dream of a life which transcends the harsh confines of the ranch and the narrow-minded attitudes personified by his father.

We should note, however, that Jody does not rebel against the realities that are forced upon him. He adjusts. This ability to adapt to adverse conditions—this “toughness”—is Jody's great strength, and the positive balance to what otherwise appears to be the harsh negativism of the story. He moves from a boy too ready to kill and dismember birds to a young man who forgoes the needless clubbing of mice. It is not a romantic, sentimental misunderstanding of nature's design which leads Jody to appreciate life. He is surrounded by death constantly, and he himself inflicts death. At no point does Steinbeck's management of point of view lead us to believe that either the author or his young protagonist believes in a benevolent natural purpose. Humans die as surely as pigs and ponies and old horses. Death is part of the natural cycle, just as are the seasons which appear in the stories. Like Grandfather and Gitano, Jody will grow old and die. Nature can be violent, bloody, and unforgiving. But against those qualities stands the potential of human compassion, the one human trait which separates humans from the buzzards that symbolize survival by dependence on death and carnage. As Howard Levant notes, “in feeding on carrion, buzzards mark the point at which death becomes an ugly imperfection that cannot be accepted serenely.”⁹ Jody senses but cannot articulate that there must be more satisfying approaches to coping with the impending death which nature forces upon all living things. Old Gitano's ascent into the mountains on a horse conspicuously named “Easter” symbolizes this spiritual potential and offers to Jody a kind of epiphany, a suggestion that there is something beyond the mere biological processes of birth and death. Human existence does not cease in the stomach of a hungry buzzard.

We noted earlier Steinbeck's theory of the phalanx, his idea that human individuals arrange themselves into larger units, like cells in the body (see the “Background” discussion). Some readers of The Red Pony feel that Steinbeck compromises his point of view management by trying to work the phalanx theory into the narrative design. R. S. Hughes, for instance, argues that Grandfather's comments about “the big crawling beast,” which presents the phalanx idea, do not “fit thematically” into “The Leader of the People.”¹⁰ Viewed in terms of The Red Pony as a narrative unit, and in light of the theme of Jody's continued initiation and maturity, however, Grandfather's awareness that the individual must see himself or herself as part of a larger unit of humanity becomes an integral part of Steinbeck's purpose. The failure to make this association between the individual and humankind collectively is what renders Carl Tiflin such an insensitive, cruel man. Moreover, it is Billy Buck's determination to keep his promise about the second colt and not to lose face as a man that leads him to kill the mare Nellie, the symbol of life's continuity. And later, though Billy Buck has some admiration for Grandfather, he ceases to listen to the lessons the old man is trying to impart through his tales. While Grandfather talks, Billy idly “watched a spider crawling up the wall” (195). Only Jody listens, though he, too, has heard the tales before. Jody is yet too young to articulate what he learns from Grandfather's experiences, but the last scene we have in the short novel is Jody taking a lemon from his mother to make lemonade for Grandfather. This visual image which groups Mrs. Tiflin, her father, and Jody separates them in our minds from Billy Buck and Carl Tiflin and suggests that Jody's future alliance will be with those who represent artistic sensibilities and humanity. Thus Grandfather's lesson about the unity that took many individuals to the ocean (the phalanx) is an important part of Jody's increasing awareness. Grandfather's ideas offer him an alternative to the hard, bloody life into which Carl Tiflin and Billy Buck have initiated Jody. Jody has learned the literal lesson from Gabilan who leaves his stall and wanders beyond the confines of his corral that if one steps beyond the narrow confines of fences, he risks death. Grandfather's experiences with a wider, multi-ethnic world beyond the ranch give Jody an alternative to that “fenced” mentality. As Grandfather teaches, it is the “westering” that matters, the questing, the searching, the going beyond apparent confinements. He fears that it “has died out of the people” (199), but in Jody we see some hope that the questing spirit can be revived. As I noted earlier, Steinbeck's intent is not a message of Pollyanna optimism, but he does want to suggest that Jody (and each of us) has choices that transcend the mere acceptance of the cold, final deaths we see in the red pony, Nellie, the buzzards, and in Carl Tiflin's indifferent crushing of the moth that tries to fly to the light (194).

Finally, in contrast to the death images that dominate the narrative, we need briefly to analyze Steinbeck's symbols of the life force. The spring and the ocean are the most apparent of these symbols. We have already mentioned the ocean and how Grandfather views it as a barrier, though it serves equally as a symbol of life itself. We can elucidate the point that the ocean serves as a symbol of the mysterious, spiritual force by noting Jody's earlier dream of the ocean that lies beyond the great mountains which he imagines old Gitano crossing (171). Significantly, Jody is lying near the spring when he imagines the mountains and the ocean, a point we will return to in a moment. Here in “The Great Mountains” the mountains (not the ocean) serve as barriers. One reaches the freedom of the ocean only after surmounting the mountains, which Jody imagines as towering “ridge after ridge after ridge” (171). Jody, however, does not envision the mountains as being either insurmountable or negative. In fact, he longs to enter them and move, like Gitano, toward the great ocean that lies beyond. The mountains symbolize the life experience Jody must acquire (sexually, morally, experientially) before he can move into the more abstract, mysterious, psychological realm emblematized by the ocean. He cannot, of course, articulate the ideas at such a young age, but his innate or instinctive awareness of the literal and spiritual quests which await him are the cause of the “nameless sorrow” (171) which fills him as he contemplates the mountains and the distant ocean.

That Jody is associated with the life force and not the death force symbolized by the buzzards and other similar images we have already noted is witnessed by the fact that Jody is lying in “the green grass” near the spring (171). The spring and the tub it fills with water so “cold that it stung his mouth” (154) are first mentioned in “The Gift,” the story which is otherwise so dominated by death and death symbols. Quite literally, when Jody pops the bloody tick between his thumbnails, he washes the death away in the cold spring (158)—a minor act of salvation. Immediately following this cleansing of the blood from Jody's hands, we are given the scene in which he discovers his pony dead, its eyes being punctured by the buzzards (159). With this juxtaposing of contrasting scenes, Steinbeck makes a point about seeing and not seeing. Jody has literally seen much; now he must learn to see in the sense of understanding. He must commence to see beyond the literal, to comprehend the lessons that his experiences have taught him. It is in light of this transition which is taking place for Jody that placing “The Great Mountains” immediately after Jody's finding his dead pony makes sense. From the small act of washing the tick's blood off his hand in the cold spring, Jody now sees the approach of human death in the form of old Gitano and must contemplate the larger concept of a transcendent spiritual life as symbolized by the great ocean.

Steinbeck reiterates the important symbolic connection between the spring and ocean by mentioning the spring early in “The Great Mountains” and repeating a similar blood/hand image. In angry frustration at his pony's gruesome death, Jody has killed and dismembered a thrush, itself a symbol of natural beauty and love.

The hills were dry at this season, and the wild grass was golden, but where the spring-pipe filled the round tub and the tub spilled over, there lay a stretch of fine green grass, deep and sweet and moist. Jody drank from the mossy tub and washed the bird's blood from his hands in cold water. Then he lay on his back in the grass. …

(161)

Again the spring symbolizes the source of Jody's absolution; but in this instance the reiterated scene serves also to remind us that Jody is about to move a step closer to an awareness of the interconnected quality of all life, further away from being a senseless destroyer of life. It is while lying beside the spring, his hands literally and symbolically cleansed, that he becomes aware of the distant mountains and begins to contemplate their “secret” (160). Old Gitano then enters Jody's life and will soon thereafter enter the mountains to await the end of his own life, thereby connecting the spring-mountain-ocean symbols. Thus, the end of the short novel, when Jody chooses not to kill the mice but chooses instead to bring his grandfather a drink, serves not only to connect the various stories within the story by reminding us of the spring from which Jody has drunk; it suggests also that Jody seems to have learned the lesson implied by the spring-ocean symbolism.

Ironically, the life force implied by the spring-ocean symbology stands in contrast to the other important water symbol Steinbeck employs. Rain throughout the novella symbolizes death. This is not a unique symbolic usage (Ernest Hemingway, for instance, uses rain extensively in A Farewell to Arms to symbolize death), but Steinbeck does use the symbol quite effectively to make the point that like water from the earth (the spring) and water from the sky (rain), life and death are natural processes. Steinbeck limits the rain symbology to “The Gift” and “The Promise,” the two stories dealing with the horses and in which death is most graphically depicted. The rain motif is especially dominant in “The Gift.” Jody wishes that “it might not rain before Thanksgiving,” (149) when he is scheduled to ride Gabilan for the first time, but the rain does come. Billy Buck then promises Jody that it will not rain again, so Jody “went to school [and] left Gabilan standing out in the corral” (150). But Billy is wrong, for again the rain returns, soaking the pony and causing the illness that leads to his death. Ironically, the rain that is usually welcomed on a dry-land ranch here is ominous and threatening, a foreshadowing of disaster. Then in “The Promise,” when the mare Nellie is about to give birth to the colt that is to replace the dead Gabilan, Steinbeck uses the rain again as a symbol of impending death: “The night was black and thick. A little misting rain fell. The cypress tree and the bunkhouse loomed and then dropped back into the mist” (183). Coupled with the black cypress tree under which the hogs are slaughtered, the rain is doubly ominous. Keeping the symbolic integrity of the rain, Steinbeck then has Billy Buck kill Nellie in order to save the colt and thereby keep his promise to Jody.

When Billy Buck yells to Jody to get “the water” (186) to wash the blood from the foal, the water symbology shifts from the fatal rain to the cleansing waters of redemption, as established by the spring symbol and Jody's hand washing. Because of the rain, Billy Buck has broken his solemn promise and allowed the red pony to die, and with the birth of Nellie's foal he tries to redeem his honor, to keep his “promise.” That he shouts the profane term “God damn you” (186) to Jody suggests both that Billy desires not to be damned for his failed promise and that he harbors some anger at Jody for forcing him into killing the mare in order to obtain forgiveness. Redemption is clearly on Billy Buck's mind. Yet, the fact that the foal is “black”—the color of the deadly cypress tree—indicates that Billy's sacrifice may not have been for the good cause he anticipated. His face remains “bloody” and his eyes “haunted” and “tired”; and though the black colt is alive and apparently well, Jody is not elated. “He tried to be glad,” but Billy's image “hung in the air ahead of him” (186). In a world in which there are no absolutes, no clear-cut divisions between salvation and damnation, and in which life and death merge into an almost indistinguishable process, Jody has moved one step further toward an understanding of the human predicament. It is this step that helps prepare him for the encounter with his grandfather in “The Leader of the People” and for the compassion which he demonstrates in that concluding story.

Notes

1. John Steinbeck, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, eds. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten (New York: Viking Press, 1975), p. 76. All further references to this work will appear in the text.

2. Jackson J. Benson, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (New York: Viking Press, 1984), p. 264.

3. John Steinbeck, The Red Pony, in The Short Novels of John Steinbeck (New York: Viking Press, 1963), p. 137. All further references to this work will appear in the text.

4. R. S. Hughes, Beyond “The Red Pony”: A Reader's Companion to Steinbeck's Complete Short Stories (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1987), p. 91.

5. Howard Levant, “John Steinbeck's The Red Pony: A Study in Narrative Technique,” in The Short Novels of John Steinbeck, ed. Jackson J. Benson (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1990), p. 85.

6. Brian Barbour, “Steinbeck as a Short Story Writer,” in A Study Guide to Steinbeck's “The Long Valley,” ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Pierian Press, 1976), p. 125.

7. John H. Timmerman, John Steinbeck's Fiction: The Aesthetics of The Road Taken (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), p. 282.

8. Ibid., p. 74.

9. Levant, pp. 85-86.

10. Hughes, p. 102.