The Theme Of Nature In John Steinbeck's The Red Pony

Have you ever experienced the moment when you feel you are powerless against the law of nature? For example, death is something that every living thing on the Earth will face at some point of its life and something that people can never control. The Red Pony written by John Steinbeck is a novel filled with symbolic events and lessons about nature’s indifference to man. According to Steinbeck, all nature, including human beings, is inseparably bound together. While the stories of the book are full of descriptions of natural phenomena such as weather, animals, and plants, reflecting and directing different incidents happening around the main character named Jody, each story also connects nature to human beings and describes man’s place in it.

Hence, through his episodic novel, The Red Pony, and experiences of Jody, Steinbeck explores man’s complex relationship with nature and reveals how human beings are vulnerable and helpless against the nature’s law.
To begin with, one of the main themes of The Red Pony is nature such as life, death, rebirth, and loss. In four different stories, Steinbeck uses various symbols, foreshadowing, and imagery in order to convey the message to the readers, which is that life and death always coexist in nature, and in spite of inevitability of death, life will keep going at all time. Steinbeck writes that “All day the dry oak leaves drifted down from the trees until they covered the ground, and yet the trees were unchanged” (p.21). As winter comes, the oak tree leaves turn brown and fall while the trees maintain their appearances and keep alive. This sentence where Steinbeck describes a change of season is a significant example of the characteristics of nature, which involve life and death at the same time. Moreover, nature sometimes simultaneously becomes the cause and effect of