In Dubious Battle Identity Quotes

Jim explains to Harry Nilson why he wants to join the Party. For Jim, it's less about politics than it is about finding a purpose for his life. He tells us later that he'd grown up in hopelessness—always knowing that he and his family were going to lose. Belonging to the group gives Jim the opportunity to throw his shoulder to the wheel with a bunch of other guys working toward the same goal. In a sense, it also relieves Jim of the painful task of creating a personal identity for himself. As a group-man (as Doc Burton calls them), he can take on the stance of the Party and stop at that.

Jim responds to his first assignment for the Party: typing letters for Mac. It's a small task, but it gets Jim outside of himself and of his own memories of a miserable past. The work gives him purpose and finally makes living worthwhile. While typing seems like a menial task—and a short one at that—it's incredibly therapeutic for a young man who has suffered trauma after trauma. The act of typing also helps Jim feel like part of something bigger than himself, and that moves him out of his lonely, individual identity.

Jim has spoken earlier of feeling "dead" or "asleep" until he joined the Party and went to work. As he and Mac ride into the countryside, Jim begins to remember parts of his life when he felt pleasure but never pursued it. In this instance, he remembers making a trip into the countryside with a boys' group and making a failed resolution to get out of the city as often as he could. Jim's awakening reminds him how often people gets the chance to define themselves and their own lives but often lose the opportunity when the complications of life take over.

Dakin points out the fluidity of any identity, depending on your line of perception. For the workers, Mac is a clever organizer, someone finally looking out for their best interests. But for the landowners, he's a nightmare, a real fly in the ointment of profit and progress. Since Dakin straddles these two identities, he doesn't really know what to think of Mac. While he knows he ought to side with the workers, Dakin has stuff and would like to own more. He can see both sides of the disagreement, and it makes him uneasy with Mac's call to war.

This telling little exchange highlights Mac's philosophy about work and life: use whatever material you've got. As they approach Anderson to ask for the use of his land, Mac has to figure out the best way to talk to the old man. His interest in the pointers has nothing to do with his love for cute, fluffy animals: it's all fodder for manipulation. If Mac can turn himself into a dog person by the time they encounter Anderson, he'll have a way into friendly conversation—and that's the way to get what he wants. Steinbeck spends a lot of time developing the concept of variable or non-existent personal identity in this work, but this is probably the clearest example of such "shape-shifting" that we get.

Doc Burton suspects that Mac is playacting with the men to get on their good side. Mac denies this and claims that his ability to slip into the local parlance has more to do with natural talent and maybe even sympathy with the workers. But we have to face facts. Mac has already shown us that he's willing and able to adjust his personality and behavior to make the most of any situation (like playing midwife, pretending to like dogs, pretending to be a humble fruit-picker).

Doc has just observed what a mystery Mac was to him, and now Mac returns the compliment. To be fair, Mac has a good point: why would a non-Party member risk his reputation and paycheck to take care of a bunch of dirty workers? Doc tells Mac that his interest is purely scientific. He wants to be in on the action so that he can get the "bigger picture"—he wants to determine the truth of the situation. It's also in Doc's nature to help people who are in need, regardless of the banner they march under.

Doc expounds on his idea that men in a mob are not the same as individual men. He uses a biological example (of course) to explain himself to Jim. He understands, as most people on the outside of a group do not, that mobs act with purpose. While the individual men in them lose their identity and personal will, the larger organism substitutes a group purpose and method to get things done. Doc believes that it is possible to understand the motives and actions of a mob, rather than simply dismissing them as a violent, unwashed bunch of people.

Doc tries to convince Jim that the other side—the landowners and their minions—are just people like the workers, on the most basic level. If Jim and Mac can hate them to the point of violence, it means that they are willing to hate themselves, and ultimately destroy themselves. Doc doesn't approve of the use of violent means to achieve the goals of the workers, and it throws him into despair at the state of things. And because Doc can't align himself with either Party politics or rampant capitalism, he finds himself in a very lonely position. There is little room in this narrative for such "high-falutin' ideas," so it's no surprise that Doc himself just... goes away.

Mac points out something that Dakin alluded to earlier: a person's identity is never absolute. It depends largely on whose side you're on or what your self-interest dictates. Mac uses this relativity to his advantage when he has to confess to London that he and Jim are, in fact, "reds." He makes sure to tell London what his position about communists should be, since he is a working man. Does Mac believe what he's saying? Or is this just another one of his tactics to win support? We'll probably never know for sure, since he's such a "shape-shifter." But Steinbeck surely does seem to believe in the relative nature of man's identity, since he's made similar statements through other characters, like Dakin and Doc.