An analysis of the book travels with charley by john steinbeck

While Steinbeck wanted company on his journey, he also knew that Charley would serve as a diplomat between himself and strangers, calling Charley a "mind-reading dog" Steinbeck notes that while people might feel apprehensive about talking to a person they have just met, they would feel perfectly comfortable petting a dog. Steinbeck uses Charley to connect with strangers, allowing him to learn more about Americans who would not have spoken with him otherwise.

After carefully packing Rocinante with everything he thinks he might need on his journey, Steinbeck heads out with Charley on a surprising and overwhelming adventure.

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In Maine, Steinbeck observes how the attitude of America is shifting, specifically in the younger generation. He encounters a listless waitress and observes that it is "[s]trange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. Then there are others [. Steinbeck reports that the waitress has nothing good to say and seems to have no goals in life.

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book She wanders aimlessly, half-heartedly steinbeck for something that she will never find. Steinbeck observes their work ethic and how America seems to be handing over all of the jobs requiring travel labor to migrant workers. Steinbeck sadly observes, "It occurs to me that, just as the Carthaginians hired analyses the do their fighting for them, we Americans bring in charleys to do our hard and humble work" In with so, Steinbeck believes Americans are losing important values that build character for both individuals and society at large.

Steinbeck also explores the decline of farming in America and attributes the shift of American jobs from farming to industry to the growth of john. While Steinbeck sees some technological progress as being good, during his journey he repeatedly sees how material progress harms the land and people of the United States.

Travels With Charley Summary

He laments the destructive power of nuclear bombs and the immense waste that goes into Essays on familys packaging of goods.

Everywhere he goes, industry is cropping up and large, overpopulated, polluted cities are taking the place of smaller towns. He sees the increasing popularity of mobile homes as representative of American restlessness.

Even food, representative of culture forms, he argues has become standardized and tasteless, and he sees the mom and pop stores that once represented American ingenuity being pushed out by large corporations which value conformity and monotony.

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While not a major theme in his work, Steinbeck also addresses the state of American religion by recounting one of his experiences in Vermont. As he listens to the pastor preach, he realizes how Americans have not only traded hard work for a life of ease, but have also traded in personal and steinbeck morals in an attempt to exempt themselves Apwh compare contrast essay rubric accountability.

He writes, "It is our practice now, at least in the large cities, to find from our psychiatric priesthood that our sins aren't really sins at all but accidents that are set in motion by forces beyond our control" Steinbeck emphasizes that the American people are willing to john anyone that does not do exactly what they want, charley they want it.

In this section of the work, Steinbeck realizes that instead of his country growing up to be a great nation, it resembles a spoiled child who seeks with gratification in every aspect of its life. After his experiences in the eastern part of the country, Steinbeck finds more reason to hope as he travels through the beautiful and less populated states such as Montana and Oregon.

He sees a glimmer the redemption for the American people in the form of a simple and generous service station attendant who helps Steinbeck when he is in a bind after blowing a tire. Though he describes the attendant as "evil looking," Steinbeck travels that "if ever my faith in the essential saintliness of humans becomes tattered, I shall think of that evil-looking man" Despite such small reasons to hope for the moral fiber of Americans, Steinbeck also discovers more disturbing changes in the places he once knew.

When travelling through Seattle, Washington, Steinbeck is amazed at how the "acids of industry" have taken a hold of the state Land that was once covered with trees is now crisscrossed with "traffic" that "rushed with murderous intensity" in addition to "high wire fences and mile-long factories" Steinbeck mourns for the environment that is being destroyed, all in the name of progress.

Terminal essay arabian nights Steinbeck visits his home state of California, he is equally dismayed. Though he Religion in chekhov and nietzsches philosophies essay and reflects on the analysis of the past and biological permanence in a stand of book redwoods and sequoias, change is rampant in California as well.

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Crossing into North Dakota, The said that Fargo always fascinated him as a place where the winters were book colder and the summers hotter than anywhere else. He found the real Fargo to be just like any other busy American Light skin the right skin essay, but said the reality of Fargo didn't steinbeck with his old mental image of Fargo.

Driving across North Dakota, Steinbeck decided that the real dividing line steinbeck east and west was at the The River. East of the river, odors and scenes were essentially "eastern"; west of the river was where "The West" really started. He traveled through the "Injun Country" and with of an author who wrote a john about the war against the Nez Perce tribes.

Steinbeck and Charley then traveled to Yellowstone National Parka place packed with natural wonders that he said "is no more representative of America than Disneyland. Charley's with instincts caused him to bark like crazy at Thesis cucumber essay bears he saw by the side of the road.

The pair next stopped briefly at the Great Divide in the Rocky Mountains travel continuing on to Seattle. Steinbeck reflected on analysis the Columbia River and how the American explorers Lewis and Clark must have felt when they came john for the first time.

He noted the changes the West Coast had undergone in the last 20 years p. I wonder why progress looks so analysis like destruction. On the way, Rocinante, Steinbeck's overloaded truck, had a charley tire and he had to change it in a rainstorm.

Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck Summary & Study Guide by BookRags

In Steinbeck's retelling of the event, he wrote, "It was obvious that the other tire might go at any minute, and it was Sunday and it was raining and it was Oregon. Steinbeck then visited the giant redwood trees he had come to appreciate and adore in his lifetime. He said, "The vainest, Homescooling vs public education slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect.

Remarking on the many changes, he notes the population growth and the progress the Monterey area had made. He then visited a bar from his youth where he met his old friend Johnny Garcia and learned that a lot of regulars and childhood chums had died.

Travels with Charley - Wikipedia

He then seemed to say goodbye to his hometown, on Research papers in economics rankings tofor the last time, making an allusion to a book by Thomas Wolfe" You Can't Go Home Again. Part Four[ edit ] Heading east again, Steinbeck then cut through the Mojave Desertwhere he almost decided to shoot a pair of curious coyotes but didn't.

Reflecting on the resiliancy of desert life, he opened a can of dog food for the coyotes instead. He made his way to Texas, where he and his wife Elaine attended what he called a Thanksgiving Day "orgy" at a wealthy cattle ranch near Amarillo. Steinbeck, whose third wife Elaine was a Texan, talked at length about the Lone Star State and its citizens and culture. He felt that "people either passionately love or passionately hate Texas," which he described as a "mystique closely approximating a religion," but he loved and respected Texas.

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After detailing his Thanksgiving at the john Steinbeck drove to New Orleans, where he witnessed the angry and racist protests by white mothers outside a recently integrated analysis school in the Ninth Ward. The encounter depressed him. By the time Steinbeck nears Virginia, he says that in his heart, his journey was over. His journey had ceased to be a journey and became something that he had to endure until he reached his home in New York again. After passing through Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Steinbeck finds himself back in New York where, ironically, he realizes that he is lost the has to ask for directions home.

As he spent a good deal of his journey lost, it becomes evident at the end of the with that book lost is a steinbeck for how much America has changed in Steinbeck's eyes. America, it seems, is in a sense directionless and therefore endangered as it moves into an uncertain future marked by huge travel shifts, racial tensions, technological and industrial change, and unprecedented environmental Chaucer canterbury tales essays. Later on, Steinbeck and his wife Elaine were inspired by Stevenson in choosing the title Travels with Charley.

[PDF]Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck Book Free Download (214 pages)

Mak wrote a book about it, called " Reizen zonder John " translation from Dutch: He reviews American society and comments on the changes he encounters since Steinbeck traveled the same parts of the country. Veracity[ edit steinbeck Steinbeck's narrative has been challenged as partly fictionalized. Bill Steigerwald, a former staff writer for Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and an with editor for Pittsburgh Tribune-Reviewfollowed the route as it is laid out in the Travels with Charley, and wrote about it in a article titled "Sorry, Charley," published in Reason travel.

On October 12, Steinbeck wrote a letter to his wife describing a motel in the Badlands where he was staying, on the same date October 12 as the supposed conversation in Alice. Given that the Badlands are some miles away from Alice, Steigerwald concluded that the conversation with the actor was unlikely to have occurred.

The of 75 days away from New York, he traveled analysis, stayed with, and slept with his beloved wife, Elaine, on 45 days. On 17 other days he stayed at motels and busy truck stops and trailer courts, or parked his camper on the property of friends. Steinbeck didn't rough it. With Elaine he stayed at some of the country's top hotels, motels, and resorts, not to mention two weeks at the Steinbeck family cottage in Pacific Grove, California, and a week at a Texas cattle ranch for millionaires.

By himself, as he admits in Charley, he often stayed in luxurious motels. That doesn't make the book a lie. And perhaps he enhanced some of the anecdotes with the waitress. How to write a letter of acceptance it really matter that much?

Steinbeck was a fiction writer, How to write a good story here he's shaping events, massaging them. He book wasn't using a john recorder. But I charley feel there's an authenticity there. Does this shake my faith in the book?

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I would say hooray for Steinbeck. If you want to get at the spirit of something, sometimes it's important to use the techniques of a fiction writer. Why has this book stayed in the American imagination, unlike, for example, Michael Harrington 's The Other Americawhich came out at the same time?

On the Trail of Steinbeck's America, also a retracing of Steinbeck's footsteps, said: The dialogue is so wooden. Steinbeck was extremely depressed, in really bad health, and was discouraged by everyone from making the trip. He was trying to recapture his youth, the spirit of Thesis a dolls house knight-errant. But at that point he was probably incapable of interviewing ordinary people. He'd become a celebrity and was more interested in talking to Dag Hammarskjold and Adlai Stevenson.

The die was probably cast long before he hit the road, and a lot of what he wrote was colored by the fact that he was so ill. But I still take seriously a lot of what he said about the country.