The Pearl

ISRAEL, Kena Maizza T.                                                        HUMALIT C38

11420901                                                                        10 August 2017

FINAL PAPER – The Pearl (novel analysis)

Introduction – synopsis, author’s bionote, details about the novel (1 page at most)

“The Pearl” is written by John Ernst Steinbeck Jr, or more popularly known as John Steinbeck. He is an American author who was born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California. His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, owned a feed-and-grain store and managed a flour plant and served as treasurer of Monterey County and his mother, Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, was a school teacher. In 1919, he enrolled at Stanford University, a decision that had more to do with pleasing his parents than anything else and in the next six years he drifted in and out of school and eventually dropped out for good in 1925. He wrote 27 books, including 16 novels, 6 non-fiction book, and two collections of short stories. Other works by John Steinbeck are: Cup of Gold (1929), To a God Unknown (1933), Tortilla Flat (1935), Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), The Long Valley (1938) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939) – which is a Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece of Steinbeck and part of the American literary canon.

        “The Pearl” was first published in 1947. It is considered to be a novella, which a text of written, fictional, narrative prose normally longer than a short story but shorter than a novel (Wikipedia). It is a story about…(insert synopsis here)…... Steinbeck’s inspiration for this novella was a Mexican folk tale from

Body – approach used, say something about it, and why you chose it, and analysis (BULK)

        The approach that I will be using for this novel analysis is the Reader-Response Approach. It is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or “audience”) and his/her experience of a literary work. It recognizes the reader as an active agent who impart “real existence” to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. This is the approach that I chose because with this approach all readers can bring in their own emotions, concerns, life experience and knowledge to their reading, unlike to other literary theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work. It is more interesting because each interpretation is subjective and unique. There is no right or wrong answers. It tends to more tolerant of multiple interpretations and own arguments are formed.

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