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dreams who consider themselves unappreciated and rejected by a decadent society.
    Steinbeck certainly did not share Jim Nolan’s aspirations to become a labor organizer by committing himself to some abstract cause beyond himself, but he did seek to influencereaders’ attitudes through his fiction. He shunned commitments because ultimately he believed in himself and his talent, although it was many years before he could display this self-confidence publicly. Ironically, his fiction declined in public esteem when he began to cast his alter egos in the role of savior, as in
The Wayward Bus.
    The power of his early works lies in his ability to infuse his characters with dreams resembling his own in intensity, although he avoided the familiar portrayal of a young writer’s struggle for success. Through his portrayal of Jim Nolan’s self-discovery of his leadership capabilities in
In Dubious Battle,
Steinbeck is making a case for the recognition of his own talent. Although he had become a nationally known success before the novel was published, he had written it when he considered himself a failure, when he could conceive of Jim Nolan’s faceless doom as possibly his own. Small wonder at the violence of his outrage over the interference of a New York “parlor pink” who threatened to jeopardize his career just when it seemed to be taking off.
    As Steinbeck perceived the “battle” of the novel’s title, it is dubious not because the outcome is uncertain—his mood when he was writing it was too alienated to render plausible any fate for Jim but the one the author elected—but rather because it was the kind of struggle that should never have occurred at all. It was similar to Milton’s war in heaven because there should have been no occasion for conflict; but there the similarity ends, for Steinbeck was not trying to justify God’s ways to man but to call for an end to man’s inhumanity to man. Steinbeck’s aim in writing
In Dubious Battle
had been to promote understanding, though he probably had little hope of doing so and resorted to shock tactics to try to shake peopleout of their complacent self-seeking by portraying its consequences.
    The difference between the motives and tactics of the two sides in the strike depicted may at first seem clearcut; but in the long run both are determined upon the triumph of their particular program, and they are not concerned about the means—including exploiting people—that they use to achieve their ends. Both are insensitive to the isolated dreamer like Doc Burton who seeks only to ameliorate people’s situations, not to impose systems upon them. In an ideal situation, Jim Nolan would have been guided but not indoctrinated by Doc Burton. Instead, when his talents were recognized, he was exploited by the side he chose to support and destroyed venge-fully by the one he opposed.
    Steinbeck’s concern was with self-realization, not just for himself, but for others, through mutual understanding. The abortive novel “L’Affaire Lettuceberg,” which Steinbeck wrote after
In Dubious Battle,
was, on the basis of what little we know of it, an attack upon the leading citizens of his home town of Salinas for using the vigilantes he detested to break up a local lettuce strike. In die long run, he decided that he would only create new conflicts by direct intervention; he chose rather to destroy the draft of “L’Affaire Lettuceberg” and supplant it with
The Grapes of Wrath,
in which Tom Joad, who, after a painful struggle has finally learned to devote himself to trying to make people understand each other, chooses to do so by encouraging them from a distance rather than provoking hostilities.
    Wherever there was open warfare between implacable forces that could not see beyond narrow self-interest, Steinbeck perceived the result could only be irreparable loss and a triumph for those who mistook victory for permanent peace. He aimedto promote an understanding of the necessity for