The Pearl
The Pearl
by John Steinbeck

The Pearl Characters

Meet the Cast

Kino

Kino isn’t very complicated. He loves his family, he dives for pearls, and he’s obsessed with being a man. That’s pretty much it. But while Kino never deviates from his masculine...

Juana

If Kino is obsessed with being a man, he is equally obsessed with keeping Juana in her place as a woman. And Juana doesn’t seem to mind. She accepts that she is to be passive, submissive, and...

The Doctor

It’s almost better to think of the doctor as a symbol instead of a character. He’s so much a caricature of everything that’s wrong with colonial oppression that he isn’t exa...

The Priest

The priest may not be as bad as the doctor, but he’s pretty close. He seems to have as little regard for the natives, and his only potentially redeeming factor is be that he doesn’t phy...

The Buyer

This is where we can really get into the whole "The Pearl is a critique of capitalism" notion. The buyer represents capitalism in its most corrupted, least functional form. The whole point of a fre...