The Red Pony Read Online Free PDF

are attracted to stories that seem to present a realistic account of life—including death—nor are they made particularly uncomfortable by scenes of cruel, even unwarranted suffering. Neither
Catcher in the Rye
nor
Lord of the Flies
were taken up by young readers because of any positive moral at the end, and recent examples of fiction specifically written for adolescents likewise approach the balance of situational ethics, not the loaded situations of proscriptive, adult-legislated morality.
    If I have drawn extended comparisons between
The Red
Pony
and equivalent stories by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Mary O’Hara, it was not merely to emphasize differences. Both of these subsequent, very popular novels bear clear debts to Steinbeck, despite their contrasting emphases, and though more clearly written for adolescent readers, they also avoid the easy resolutions and faultless adult tutors of so much earlier literature aimed at that young audience. True, problems are introduced in those two novels in order to achieve resolutions, and the deaths and near deaths of pets are integrated to the social necessity of maturation. But both stories share Steinbeck’s interest in psychological and familial realism, presenting parents and other adults who can be as misguided and self-interested as children. And both portray the rural scene as something less than the locus of a pastoral idyll, but rather as a place in the American landscape as prone to economic complications and deadly accident as the urban scene. These emphases, I would suggest, can be traced to Steinbeck’s influence.
    Steinbeck, once again, was only forwarding, with his own revisions, the lessons of agrarian fiction found in the works of Hamlin Garland and Willa Cather, and he was assisted in this regard by his fellow writers Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner as well. But in Steinbeck’s
The Red Pony
we find a singular instance of the daily rounds of the farmer’s life as it impinges on the felt need of a small boy to force some space for himself in the neighboring world. It is also, notably, a story in which anger in open and indirect manifestations is the chief emotion expressed, rage against the necessity of death that encircles all events. Such anger is classically an aspect of grieving, reminding us once again that Steinbeck wrote these stories in the shadow of his mother’s mortality and the matched prospect of his father’sdecline. But if
The Red Pony
served as a channel for Steinbeck’s grief, the parables the book contains testify also to the supremacy of craft over emotion, as well as signaling a move away from the stylistically luxuriant early prose toward the matter-of-fact manner, the perfect detachment of irony that characterizes his greatest work. They attest to the author’s arrival at artistic maturity, one sign of which is his refusal to allow Jody an equivalent crossing-over.
    The Red Pony
is not, as I stated in the beginning, a book for children, but it is preeminently a book about a child. Perhaps the present edition will lead readers to an unimpeded recognition of the true nature and enduring importance of a story cycle that was central not only to the author’s emergence as a major American novelist but to the development of a distinctly midtwentieth-century genre, opening up as it did a whole new range of possibilities about the fictional presentation of a child’s world. For whatever else this book may be, it is most assuredly a book about a boy, a caterpillar kid moreover, not a fragile adolescent butterfly, in whom we may easily recognize that embryonic barbarian who once stood in the way of our path from home.

Suggestions for Further Reading
    Astro, Richard.
John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist
. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973.
    Benson, Jackson J.
The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer
. New York: Viking Penguin, 1984.
    Fontenrose, Joseph.
John Steinbeck: An Introduction