Dialectical journals
Ross Kelly
20th Cent lit 6th
      1. “He doesn’t think about me. He’s made someone up and it’s like he put my skin on her. I’m not like that- not like the made-up one.” (496)

      Abra felt that she was not good enough for Aron. She felt that Aron was pure and perfect, and that she was not. She knew that Aron wanted everything in his life to be perfect and holy, and she did not feel that she was the person Aron thought she was. She felt that Aron was not looking at her for who she was, but rather, as the perfect vision he had of her. Because he was doing this, she felt that he did not know the real her, and she felt lost. This situation seems very similar to the relationship between Adam and Cathy. Adam had also created a perfect and holy wife, and did not see Cathy for who she was. While Abra is not the cruel and terrible person Cathy was, the relationships between their husbands and them are the same. The fact that both men created an ideal wife says a lot about their nature.
      Adam and Aron are similar in that they do not look deep enough surroundings, but rather create their own visions of things. Adam never questioned the fact that the money he got from his father was probably dishonest money until he was practically on his deathbed. He also jeopardized his fortune on a venture that was very risky because he thought in his mind that it was possible. He didn’t think deeper and consider that many things could go wrong while transporting lettuce across the country because many things could go wrong that were beyond his control, no matter how much preparation and planning was put into it. These are both examples, along with his creation of his own perfect Cathy, that show how Adam sees the world in idealistic ways, and does not see the true nature of things.
      The same can be said about Aron. Aron wants everything around him to be pure and perfect. He wanted to become a minister, and at college, he was so appalled by the world and all of the sins around him, that he spent all of his time outside of class in his room studying and writing to Abra. Aron did not understand that nothing in the world was perfect. He thought that he would be able to make a perfect life with Abra on a ranch, but if he did, it would all be a created world. Nothing ever is perfect, and Aron was not able to accept that. He had created a perfect vision of Abra, and she was intimidated by the fact that he could not see the real her. Both Aron and Adam saw the world too idealistically, and it brought a lot of pain to them when their perfect worlds were shattered.
2. “And always there was Alice to play with, Alice to love her and trust her. Alice was her friend, always waiting to welcome her to tinyness.” (552)

      Cathy had spent her life detesting all humans and feeling that there was nothing but evil even in the best of men. She would use this to her benefit, and felt no pity or shame when she destroyed someone’s life. Steinbeck even described her as a monster, a person with a deformed soul who would never be quite human (if such a person were to exist). However, as Cathy contemplated suicide, and thought her life over, she realized that she always had a friend in her favorite childhood story, Alice in Wonderland.
      The fact that even Cathy had to have a friend to confide in when she could take no more of the world changes the way I thought of her. Before, I had accepted Steinbeck’s original interpretation of Cathy, and saw her as pure evil. I thought that she would never be able to love anything, not even herself. I now see that even Cathy needed someone to love. Perhaps she befriended Alice because she was a fictional character whom she would never meet, and thus she was never able to find a human flaw that she would feel the need to exploit. Cathy still did need a friend however, which makes me see that she was human after all, and though she was almost completely evil, she still had the normal human emotions in her.
      I now see Cathy as a person who has chosen to only see the flaws in people, and could never get past them, just as Aron did. However, instead of choosing the path of wanting to help the world get rid of the flaws, she choose to destroy them in another fashion that was not so helpful. Cathy was not a monster with a deformed soul, she was just a person who made the decision to attack the things she saw wrong in the world instead of trying to help them.

      3. “I am incomparably, incredibly, overwhelmingly glad to be home. I’ve never been so goddam lonesome in my life.” (419)

      Lee had taken care of the twins his whole life, and was devoted to raising them and taking care of Adam and the household. If Lee had never lived with the boys, it is obvious that both of them would have come out in a completely different way. He had once had a dream to go run a bookstore in San Francisco, and before that he had also hoped to find love. However, as time went on, both of these dreams disappeared, and he devoted his life to raising the boys. He left his dream of the bookstore shortly after leaving, and realized that his true home and calling was with the boys and Adam in Salinas Valley.
      Lee seems to have taken the role of a mentor and a guide to help the boys decide which path they would take in life. He abandoned his own dreams to do this, which makes me think of him as a purely selfless person. He is the kind of person all people strive to become. Lee and Samuel both had the same roles of their generations in this book. Samuel helped guide Adam on his path, and was loved by all. He was also truly selfless, and the only people who did not envy the attitude of Samuel were those who were truly only selfish. Though no one is ever perfect in every way, both Lee and Samuel were people who came as close as it got. Both of them were like consciences to the people around them, and a guide of how to treat people. Both had a lot of wisdom about life and the relationships between people, and both would freely give their advice to anyone who would listen. Both Samuel and Lee devoted their lives to helping the people around them and were the role models that Steinbeck put in the book to model the ideal behavior to.

      4. “Around didn’t grow up. Maybe he never will. He wanted the story and he wanted it to come out his way. He couldn’t stand to have it come out any other way.” (577)

      Abra loved Aron with all of her heart and she admitted it freely. She wanted to spend her life with him, and was distressed, as mentioned before, when she thought that he wasn’t seeing the real her. She didn’t want to live with a person, no matter how much she loved him, if he wouldn’t see her, and the world the way it truly was. When Aron left, Abra saw that she needed certain things in her life to be happy as well. She needed to be with someone who loved her back, and saw the true her. Aron had constructed his vision of Abra and the way his life should have gone, and she felt that she would have no say in it. She eventually grew to love Cal as well, except this love was different.
      Cal saw the world for what it was, and had learned that he would have to deal with it. He grew past his original childhood interpretations of the world and saw it for what it really was as he grew up. He knew that nothing was perfect. Cal felt lost because he knew his family and his surroundings had so many problems. When Abra became interested in Cal, she told him of her father, and how he was a thief. Both told all of their secrets to each other and confessed to the fact that neither were perfect. They still both loved each other after knowing these secrets which seemed to result in true love.
      Cal and Abra had developed this true love because they both saw each other for who they were, and did not create any fictions around their love. While Abra may have loved Aron for all he was, he would have never loved her because he had created his own fantasy of what she was like. The idea of seeing a person for who they truly were came up repeatedly in the story. Cathy felt that the only person she could have loved would have been Charles because Charles saw Cathy for who she truly was. No one else had seen her truly, and she had hated the rest of the world for that. This story showed how people can love many others for different reasons, but true love is when two people see each other for everything they truly are, and love them for both their flaws and their strengths as a person.