The Pastures of Heaven Read Online Free PDF

linked to the story of Shark Wicks.
    The concluding stories of Pat Humbert and John Whiteside both focus on the family house in the valley and the broken dreams associated with it. For Humbert that house is as stifling as the antiquated attitudes of his parents. When they die he lives for a time with the ghosts of the past, but an accident allows him to see that new possibilities lie open to him. Inadvertently overhearing a conversation between the comely Mae Munroe and her mother, in which Mae expresses an interest in the Humbert house, Pat is inspired to remodel the home as a prelude to beginning their courtship. He finishes the project only to discover that she has just become engaged to young Bill Whiteside. He retreats back to a “dark and unutterably dreary” house, accepting the sterile solitude that had characterized the lives of his parents, his dreams vanquished.
    The Munroes are also involved in the destruction of the Whiteside family dreams, although more dramatically so. Mae Munroe is certainly not the cause of Pat Humbert’s distress, in the sense that she is not aware that he has overheard her comments about the house, and she has no idea that he is interested in her romantically. Bert Munroe is more directly involved in the Whiteside debacle. The richest story in the collection, the saga of the Whiteside family covers three generations, beginning with Richard’s desire to found a dynasty in the Pastures with the family house as its center. His only child, John, carries on the dream, only to have it shattered when his son, Bill, marries Mae Munroe, adopts her values, and moves out of the valley. The burning of the family home is thus emblematic of the destruction of the family dream of dynasty.
    The involvement of the Munroe family is complex in this story. In an earlier tale, Bill Whiteside has an opportunity for a romance with Molly Morgan, who might have remained in the valley and helped fulfill the ancient dream of the family. But Bill’s insensitive comments to her preclude any development of the relationship. Later, Bert Munroe’s hired hand frightens her out of the valley altogether. Mae Munroe might have married Pat Humbert, had the timing of the courtship been more favorable, but she weds Bill and insists on moving to Monterey, violating the objectives of the founding father of the Whitesides. But Bill’s parents might have remained in the house had Bert Munroe not assisted in a disastrous attempt to burn the brush in the area, which leads to the immolation of the Whiteside house and the family dream. This event, the simultaneous destruction of the family house and stature, links Steinbeck’s story to a rich legacy in American fiction, one that includes Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” George Washington Cable’s “Belle Damoiselles Plantation,” and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, to name only a few. The collapse of the grand ambitions of the original settlers of the Pastures of Heaven provides a fitting end to the central stories of the volume, one brought to ironic conclusion by the epilogue.
    The epilogue provides the enclosing envelope for the ten stories, much as the prologue initiates the central themes of the volume. That it takes place at a temporal and psychological distance from the central action also mirrors the opening sequence, and the irony of the conclusion completes the stories of broken dreams, disillusionment, and painful realizations that awaited the people who moved into the valley. As the opening dramatized the historic beginnings of the settling of the valley, the closing shows a modem bus bringing tourists to the area along the same route the Spanish corporal had taken. But now the valley has been domesticated with homes and farms, and cows wearing bells have replaced the grazing deer of the prologue. The tourists too have their dreams for the valley, but they reflect the mercantile ambitions