26 pages • 52 minutes read
John SteinbeckFlight
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1938A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
His Father’s Knife
The knife Pepé plays with behind the barn symbolizes his desire to be a man. The narrative reveals that the knife is Pepé’s inheritance from his father. It is a big, heavy knife—not a child’s toy, but a tool for providing for and protecting the family. While Pepé is eager to take on this responsibility, Mama Torres constantly reminds him that he is still a child.
When Mama Torres sends Pepé to the store, a job that partially fulfills the responsibility of a man to provide for the family, Pepé is overeager to assert his manhood and too quick to use the knife. As a result, he must begin his journey as a man prematurely. He is not prepared for what he will face but must depart nonetheless. When Pepé is well on his journey and finds that he needs the knife (i.e., the moment he needs to be a man), he finds that it is missing.
His Father’s Clothing
The clothing that Pepé inherits from his father is a symbolic representation of Pepé’s newly-acquired manhood, developing the themes of The Difficulty of Growing Up and Masculinity, Violence, and Personhood. When Pepé embarks on his true test of manhood, he inherits several of his father’s articles of clothing—a hat, a coat, and a gun. However, rather than transforming Pepé into the man he wants to be, these items only disguise Pepé as a man. The farther he goes on his journey to escape the avenger of the man he killed, the more his disguise falls apart. One by one, the items of clothing are lost or intentionally left behind. As this façade falls away, Pepé begins to act increasingly like a frightened, injured animal—crawling on his belly like a snake, slinking into the brush like a mountain lion—until he reaches his limit.
Mist and Sight
Several times, the motif of mist or an impediment to sight is used to develop the theme of The Difficulty of Growing Up. When Pepé returns from the fight at Mrs. Rodriguez’s house, he is determined to escape the avenger who will come for him. However, as soon as he begins his journey, supposedly as a man, he immediately encounters difficulty seeing: “Moonlight and daylight fought with each other, and the two warring qualities made it difficult to see” (35). Pepé wants to be a man, but the way to do that is unclear. He is lost in the battle between the moonlight, representing his past, and the daylight, symbolizing his future, leaving him a misty figure in the distance (35).
Over the course of the narrative, Pepé is forced to navigate in darkness, dust, and moonlight with “misty eyes.” Aside from the beginning of his journey that takes him through the forest, Pepé is rarely able to walk easily through clear daylight. The landscape is almost always obscured from him in some way.
Colors
Colors are a common motif in this story, underscoring the theme of The Superiority of Nature Over Man. The colors described are always simple—blue, red, and white rather than azure, crimson, or eggshell—and they serve as a warning of the challenges and dangers humans will face if they enter certain areas.
The story opens with the Torres family farm, which is dominated by brown, white, and gray with a few spots of red. These are forbidding colors that indicate difficulty and struggle rather than abundant resources, reflected in the fact that the two young children have to help provide for the family. The only spots of color on the farm are the lean livestock.
When Pepé begins his journey through the forest, the colors change temporarily to blues, greens, and purples, but this comfortable, shaded part of his journey is short-lived. Soon, the colors shift back to forbidding shades of brown and white. In this landscape, Pepé quickly becomes dehydrated, and his injury becomes infected, making travel difficult. However, the animals, representing nature, are always at their ease. A rattlesnake warns Pepé not to approach and goes on its way. The wildcat ignores Pepé’s presence and returns to drinking. The mountain lion quietly observes Pepé and his suffering. These creatures are calm and at ease in the same environment that tortures Pepé.
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By John Steinbeck
