Good vs. Evil in Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle

Overview of In Dubious Battle

In Dubious Battle, published by John Steinbeck in 1936, tells the story of poor field workers fighting a losing cause against prosperous orchard owners. Rather than a story of reform and revolt, the novel is fundamentally a struggle between good and evil — and a meditation on the self-destructive impulse that lives within all of humanity. Steinbeck wrote the novel after visiting migrant settlements in the Central Valley of California, and that firsthand experience lends the story a grounded, documentary quality.

Jim Nolan, the tale's main character, is a young man in search of himself when he meets a Communist Party organizer trying to build a cohesive union among the fruit pickers. One critic noted that the fruit farms are an important theme throughout the novel, as are Jim's reactions to the events unfolding around him: "However, although the beckoning potential of the apple trees hangs heavily over the story throughout the novel, Jim's vision of fruitful farms is undercut by the dark masculine realities of deceit, violence, and death" (Werlock 53). The novel does not resolve these tensions neatly. Instead, it uses the orchard strike as a lens through which Steinbeck examines something far larger — the eternal conflict within human nature itself.

Jim clearly represents the workers' interests, partly because he is so lost, and partly because after he loses his mother he begins to think of himself consistently as already "dead." His mother's dying haunts him: "She wouldn't speak to me, she just looked at me. She was hurt so bad she didn't even want a priest. I guess I got something burned out of me that night" (Steinbeck 242). He typifies the hopelessness of the workers and their cause, and their ultimate inability to fight the powerful owners who refuse to pay organized labor higher wages.

Jim Nolan: Decency and Self-Destruction

Jim is also introspective and quietly afraid as he reflects on his own life. "I never look at anything," he admits. "I never take time to see anything. It's going to be over, and I won't know — even how an apple grows" (Steinbeck 239). He is a decent person, but he is too easily swayed by Mac and his ideology. In this sense, Jim represents the self-destructive mechanism that Steinbeck believed lives within everyone. Jim is clearly on a path toward self-destruction — much like his father before him — and Mac simply helps him choose that road.

Mac represents the Communist Party, but he is a sleazy and selfish man — and this, it seems, is part of Steinbeck's implicit commentary on the Party itself. At one point, Mac reveals how he regards the women of the camp, treating them as mere sexual objects rather than as fellow human beings. "I never saw such a bunch of bags as this crowd.... Only decent one in the camp is thirteen years old. I'll admit she's got an eighteen-year-old can, but I'm doing no fifty years.... Every time the sun shines on my back all afternoon I get hot pants. What's wrong with that?" (Steinbeck 53). Mac is dedicated to his cause, but morally compromised, and at times his character reads as a kind of ideological con artist.

Mac and the Representation of Evil

Mac is the clearest representation of evil in the novel, while Jim represents goodness and decency. In the end, Mac reveals his true character when he exploits Jim's death to further the cause — just as he has used so many others throughout the story. He "picked Jim up and slung him over his shoulder, like a sack; and the dripping head hung down behind" (Steinbeck 250). Some critics liken Mac to Satan or the serpent in the Garden of Eden: "As he displays Jim's faceless body, Mac is again like the serpent in the Garden" (Werlock 62). Whatever Steinbeck's precise intention, Mac is clearly evil, and what he works for is tainted by that evil — in the eyes of the growers as well as the reader.

Mac dehumanizes the people around him just as he dehumanizes Jim's death. He is an inhumane man working for what many consider a humane cause, and so he stands as both a juxtaposition and a fraud. As a representative of the Communist Party, he is a poor one indeed — his methods reflect on his cause, and Steinbeck depicts both with equal unflattering clarity.

Conclusion

In Dubious Battle is a sometimes hopeful and often disturbing novel about the decency that lives in mankind — and the indecency that lives there too. It is not simply about how human beings treat one another; it is about how humanity perceives itself with a kind of deep self-loathing, and how that self-loathing translates into everything people do and think. As one critic wrote of the novel, "It still stands as the same hard-edged, face-to-face encounter with the human dilemma regarding the nature of work, power, personal freedom, and degree of responsibility and commitment individuals have toward their fellow human beings — all of this played out in a universe of benign indifference" (Tammaro 101).