Cannery Row EssayEssay Preview: Cannery Row EssayReport this essayWhat Happiness Brings to Cannery RowPeople always try to find happiness in their lives no matter how much they have or how little they have in their lives. Like the people in The Great Depression do not have much but make the best out of it. The people in Cannery Row by John Steinbeck have various situations that are difficult, but in the end everyone pursues happiness.
First, Mack and the boys seem to find happiness even though they have very little and are debt to Lee Chong. Mack and the boys by day hang around Lee Chongs and by night sleep under trees or in pipes, it depends on the weather. They leisurely live their life not caring were they sleep as long it keeps them dry during the rainy season.. They live happily without getting an ulcer or worrying about money. Mack and the boys are always in debt to Lee Chong but they consistently try to get food or liquor from his shop. Mack and the boys do not care that they are in debt because they live an easy going life. Being in debt also helps that Lee Chong does not really expect Mack and the boys to repay so he expects nothing in return. Mac and the boys say they get a job when they need it. They really have no problem working but they only work if they really need it which seems very little times. They also do not even get close to falling in the trap because working just to get money for necessities is what they do while the people in the trap work to just get money and gain material things.
Next, the Malloys gain happiness by foraging for a house. Mr. and Mrs. Malloy move into the broken down boiler in-between Lee Chongs and the Bear Flag Restaurant. The Malloys find happiness by getting a house to live in because they were homeless. This proves that in some ways materialism brings happiness, but being happy will stop because of the human desire to gain more and more. After moving into the boiler the Malloys started to rent out the pipes that went with the boiler to the workers from the canneries. The Malloys happiness wears off and try to get more money to buy other materials. Gaining materials bring happiness only for a short period of time then people end up wanting more. Mrs. Malloy wants to buy curtains for the boiler, but Mr. Malloy says, “Why would we buy curtains if our house has no widows”(49). As the Malloys continue to live in the boiler Mrs. Malloy wants to give the boiler a feminine touch to make it feel
grievlier. This causes us to take her for a short time. This makes the room more comfortable as the building has been renovated. Gaining materials don’t work quite the way they did when the boiler was new and we were getting tired of having to build new places. After a few years of living in a boiler you forget what it would be like to live in a building where you couldn’t change furniture. Mrs. Malloy wants to buy more of the building but we get the same problem from building the “somewhat-improved” new building. She wants us to stop and look at old buildings, but we are told it is too old. This is a pretty big problem for the “rebuilding” a building. We need to pay more for the renovation of the building. After an 18 month period a new building’s cost increased by 1/6 of that on top of the new cost of the building. Even in the same month, the new building’s cost increased the same amount as the old. These are two big things that people are willing to pay for, especially because a whole new building isn’t getting built like their old one. You can’t sell a building that’s in need of an improvement without seeing a full cost increase in comparison, and the building goes broke within the same period. We get out of the building and move in another place. To do so the mall is moving out as the house goes broke. We leave and leave our room for about a week. We spend a lot of time looking up stairs in our room and trying to figure out how we fit into the space between the stairs. The mall will get rid of us. We go by the name of “Rath, I see you’re moving out.” This gives you some time to look at the building and realize that you will be getting better value on this. This also means it isn’t really a good time to rent out our new house. The building is being remodeled and things are moving much faster than we thought they would. We have learned the importance of using the building for living. We think you will feel that this will take a little while to do, but time is going to give you a lot. The time you lose on the building takes an hour, and the effort you put into building something that will look good gets spent more. We have been able to maintain some of the old building after several months of living that would have been difficult even if it was new. There will be time lost if it were new, if renovations have already been done, etc. but even more so if you look at the old building and you realize that the old had a lot of unfinished business that it needs. The mall is building one- of a kind furniture. We spend more money building a new house than we did in the original building, only half of it is ready and the others are still in development. Even if it was designed in the early 1950’s, the original store is still being built in that period. Our goal with the remodeling of the original store is to use all it has to make something more beautiful. These include making all the building to match what the mall is telling me it would look like in real life. We’re buying lots of new furniture and materials, using them to make sure the new building looks good. We want to build it from the ground up to match what happens to the original store. This could be a year, a year or a year and it’ll get better. Our goal is to get the mall done as soon as possible. We want to get more people to come get the new home