Kino refuses, for he feels that it will give them better lives than they presently have. By this time, Juana is convinced that the pearl is a harbinger of evil and pleads with her husband to throw the pearl back into the sea. That night, the couple is victimized by robbers who hit Kino on the head, but are unsuccessful in stealing the pearl. Actually, the doctor does something to make the child sick so that he could then heal him and get paid for it. The priest advise Kino that he needs to give thanks for his good luck while the doctor prevails upon Kino to have his baby treated. He shouts his good fortune to his fellow divers, and before he reaches home, the news is already known to the inhabitants of the village and the town, including the priest and the doctor. Upon opening it, he beholds a pearl as large as the egg of a seagull. Meantime, Kino discovers an unusually large oyster. She does this by applying brown seaweed to the wound until the swelling subsides. Juana, in turn, treats her baby whose shoulder has become swollen from the scorpion’s bite. Kino goes back to work, diving for oysters from his canoe. The truth is that he refuses ot help the couple for two reasons: they cannot afford to pay the doctor’s fee and also because the doctor is prejudiced against Kino’s race. Juana then sets off for the doctor’s residence while Kino and a crowd of villagers follow her.Īt the doctor’s house, Juana is informed that the doctor is not in. When Juana tells her partner to fetch the doctor, he and the neighbors tell her that the doctor will never come to such an impoverished place as theirs.

They live a somewhat peaceful, uneventful life until their baby gets bitten by a scorpion. He lives with Juana and they have a baby named Coyotito. The main protagonist o John Steinbeck’s novella “The Pearl” is a young Mexican Indian pearl diver named Kino. No reader would expect such a lovely place to be the setting for a tragedy in which Kino found a pearl that would result in the loss of much that meant to him. It possessed a primitive vitality, a harsh simplicity and a romantic beauty – all of which are found in “The Pearl”. For Steinbeck, Mexico was everything America was not.

The black pearl john steinbeck