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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
Christopher Morley.
“Boy against Death.”
Saturday Review, 16
(25 September 1937), 18.
Tortilla Flat and Of Mice and Men were not accidents. It is unlikely that anything Mr. Steinbeck publishes will be casual; he is a controlled, deliberate and ascertained workman. In this little book he again shows himself equal in power and in sensitiveness, and purposeful in both. It would not be fair to suppose that because The Red Pony appears in a deluxe limitation that he (or his publisher) regards it as hors d'ceuvre. It may be a sketch of some shape of things to come; it may be a mood (of memory or fancy) that the author prefers to keep within restricted bounds. It has on it his own mark of beauty and pain.
It would be possible (as it always is possible) to read into these three episodes in the life of a ten-year-old boy some larger meanings and suggestions. Is it the first glimmering in the boy's mind of the collapse of faith or certainty? For first the death of the pony, and then the death of the mare in bearing another foal, are attributable (in the boy's mind) to Billy Buck who knew all about horses. So Billy (a notable character portrait) proves fallible after all. That is one suggestion of fable that the reader may find; and there are others. Mr. Steinbeck is a writer of such gauge that we enjoy speculating what he may have intended between the lines. It is an impertinence: but he has earned the right to be subjected to it.
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