"Paradox and Dream" and Other Essays Literary Elements

Non-fictional essays

America, mid-20th century; Italy during World War II; Vietnam during the war in the 1960’s; Europe after World War II

First person narrator from Steinbeck’s point of view

Informal and conversational for the most part situated within a sardonic irony often used to soften political outrage and social commentary.

Varies. Collectively speaking, Steinbeck tends to shy away from individualizing good and evil in favor of abstract representatives: tolerance versus small-mindedness, working man versus corporations, imagination versus conformism, etc.

The overriding conflict at work in most of Steinbeck’s essays is most accurately described as progressive individualism versus reactionary conformity.

Because this body of work is a comprehensive body of work in essay form stretching across decades and touching upon a vast range of topics, there is no genuine climax, but biographically speaking, one can effectively choose one of two possible events which occurred near the end of Steinbeck’s life which essentially serve as climaxes. One, his winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The other is the irreparable and still-lasting damage done to his reputation as a liberal icon when he some of his final published writing took the controversially hard-line conservative perspective of justifying the war in Vietnam.

At various times in his analysis of the state of America in the 1960’s, it becomes almost eerie the way that Steinbeck seems to foreshadow the next point in American history reaching such a state of turbulence: the Trump era. In “Genus Americanus” he describes aging seniors in retirement communities in warm southern climates living on fix incomes with revenue derived from investments who charge every fluctuation in the cost of living, rise in taxes and other signs of economic instability threatening their future before arriving at one conclusion which is prescient in its long-term foreshadowing: “This makes them fair game for the man or group with dictatorial desires.”

Steinbeck’s reputation as an icon of liberalism who steadfastly supported a progressive agenda came to a crashing end just before his death when a series of war correspondence detailing his eyewitness account of the Vietnam War unexpectedly revealed he supported the unpopular policies of the Johnson administration. The criticism can be argued as unjust and unfair: he was merely reporting what he saw and extrapolating opinions based on that experience. The complexity of the war in Vietnam is today belied by the irrefutable evidence of it being a mistake, but at the time Steinbeck’s account was a profound understatement: “This war in Vietnam is very confusing…not like any we have ever been involved in.”

In an essay on sports, Steinbeck admits he has no problem with killing animals for survival, but finds the image of stuffed animals hanging on walls unpleasant before adding with a wry wink: “I must admit I have enjoyed two stuffed specimens on public display.” He is alluding here to the fact that the preserved bodies of Lenin and Stalin used to be on public display a mausoleum in Moscow.

The dehumanization aspect of training young men drafted to fight a war into killing machines is made palpable in the imagery which opens one of Steinbeck’s war essays about from World War II: “The men wear their helmets, which made them all look alike, make them look like long rows of mushrooms…The men are units in an army. The numbers chalked on their helmets are almost like the license numbers on robots.”

The entirety of “Paradox and Dream” is constructed around revealing the paradoxical character of Americans. Just one example are the essay’s opening lines: “We bridle and buck under failure, and we go mad with dissatisfaction in the face of success. We spend our time searching for security, and hate it when we get it.”

The opening paragraph of “Atque Vale” sets the thematic exploration of racism with an example of parallelism as ironic rhetorical device: “We expected Negros to be wise than we are, more tolerant that we are, braver, more dignified than we, more self-controlled and self-disciplined.”

Steinbeck engages a very common metonym to describe the practice of giving up a political fight against the machinery of bureaucracy before the battle has even begun: “Go fight City Hall! The implication is, of course, that you can’t win. And yet in other times we did fight City Hall and often we won.”

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