This thing fills me with pleasure. I don't know why, I can see it in the smallest detail.
This is a very short story, more a sketch than a story, really. As far as action goes, most people would say nothing happens. And so the opening line quoted above not only applies to the scene which the narrator recalls, but perhaps to the author and certainly to any reader making a connection. Some are bound to find it a pleasurable experience while almost certainly a larger chunk of readers will not share the narrator’s passion. It is not a question of intellect—it is not whether one “gets” the meaning—but more about emotional resonance. Whether one gets it or not will depend more upon their emotional connection than any intellectual analysis.
The Proposition was put forward that she should be called Saint Katy the Virgin. However, a minority argued that Katy was not a virgin since she had, in her sinful days, produced a litter. The opposing party retorted that it made no difference at all. Very few virgins, so they said, were virgins.
This story sticks out from all the rest in the collection for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it does not take place in the valley region of California. More importantly, however, is the tone which is ironic, satiric and irrefutably apart from Steinbeck at his most traditional. That said, this story is evidence enough that had he been so inspired, Steinbeck might well have pursue the path of Jonathan Swift. It is short, terse and often reads like one of those narrative books from the Bible. Which, almost surely, was the intent.
She was a fine wife, but there was no companionship in her.
This quote offers insight into Jim Moore, but could just as easily be dropped into a number of other stories. Or, change the pronouns and gender references and they would still be not merely appropriate but thematically relevant. The collection is filled with husbands and wives whose ability communicate is questionable, to say the least. The inability for husbands and wives to connect—fault is of far less significance than fact—is not just background, but foregrounded as a driving mechanism behind the narrative treks.
"It's the most beautiful thing in the world...It's the most terrible thing in the world."
The doctor’s paradoxical exclamatory assertions here both apply to the same thing: a lab snake about to kill a lab rat for food. The paradox applies well beyond the doctor; Philips is really the personification of a fundamental approach to literature that informs not just these stories, but everything in Steinbeck’s canon. He tells stories in the sense of “this is what happened” and leaves the moral judgment of that action to the readers.
