The Pearl Journal Entries

Hallie Walther

            Entry 1:

In the book The Pearl, Kino is changed by the presence of the pearl in his life. He starts to become afraid of everyone and thinking that they will destroy him. In fact, the real person he needs to be worried about being destroyed by is himself. Kino is slowly becoming a monster by trying to protect his pearl. One of the ways he does this is by isolating himself from other people because of paranoia. I don’t think that Kino had any idea that he was changing until Juana told him that the pearl was changing their lives and that they should get rid of it. I predict that even though the family had noble wishes in the begging of the book like saving their child, getting married and sending their child to school I think that their intentions will become more self-centered as the book goes along.

            The greed also affects the rest of the community. The most obvious example is the doctor. He only would see the baby when the parents had money. We can assume that he gave the baby medicine to make him sick so he could charge the parents. On top of that he offered to keep the pearl “safe” in his safe and again we can assume that he did not have noble intentions. The greed also extended to the larger community. We say this becasue many of the members of the community who had not previously paid attention to the family paid attention when they had something of value. This phenoniom was also seen in Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. In this book not many people paid attention to the drunken Mr. Doolittle until he became rich and then people he was astrainged with suddenly became interested in him once again.

            There was a symbol that I thought encompassed the theme of the book. I believe that the theme of the book is greed. This symbol was comparing when the author had previously described how a pearl was made by a clam creating a hard shell over a grain of sand and when the author described how Kino had a shell of hardness growing over him. This is continuing to show how the pearl is a symbol for greed and how an obsession with materialistic things can change people in bad ways. We see this theme not only in book but in the real world. Many times you hear stories of corrupt politicians that use all of their power and money to benefit them not doing their job to help others. This reinforces the theme that when money is involved greed takes over.