Greed As A Fact Of Life

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The central theme of “The Pearl”, by John Steinbeck, is greed. Greed has been shown in the novel to be seen as an ugly human nature that everyone tends to have, either as a potential or an obviously invisible characteristic. The struggle to overcome greed costs a price which we all might have experienced at least once and which history has shown to be timeless. The purpose of the story is both to expose the greed that is one of the bad human natures and to show that anyone can overcome it if they put effort on and willing to do it. The author shows the ugly side effects of greed and how people react to it. Greed can change a person from good to bad, but rarely the reverse. I think the way the characters behave in the situations that happen in the novel is apparently and likely to be the same as anyone would have reacted in any particular situation. As a matter of fact, greed is in everyone. It is just how people look at it and how a person can either express it out or have it hidden in the inside. Greed can blind a person and change his or her way of living as well as the way a person looks at life. John Steinbeck provides a good example of how this “potential” nature can change a person’s life. Kino and his family and every other person who have heard about the giant pearl began to face challenging situation from Kino’s finding this valuable object. Greed has gradually grown in them and made them suffer greatly. The pearl is nothing but a “grain of sand” that “could lie in the folds of muscle and irritate and flash until in self-protection the flesh coated the grain with a layer of smooth cement” (16); but the people have given it a value so that it represents something huge and precious. Throughout the story, the value of the pearl has changed over a short period of time, from something “great” to something that represented “evil”. At first, the pearl
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