A short story doesn't always have to deliver a clear moral. A story could just present a slice of life and leave any significance up to the reader's imagination. John Steinbeck's narratives often take both approaches, landing between preachy sentimentality and nonjudgmental depiction of the lowlife.

"Flight" is a prime example. On one level it's a straight-ahead account of the last days of Pepé, a poor Mexican-Indian boy who unintentionally kills a man and flees from justice on horseback into the mountains of southern California. Yet, without any blatant moralizing, it seems to making a point. An elusive point. Ambivalently.

The story never really gets inside the boy's mind. We Pepé's pride, his desperation and his ultimate concession from his plainly described behavior. Nor do we get any sense of those tracking him (a posse?). They're known to us—and to Pepé—only by the yelping of their dogs and the damaging effects of their gunshots.

The potentially most emotional scenes come before the flight, as Pepé's widowed mother packs him off for his attempted escape, knowing she'll likely never see him alive again. But there are no tears or exclamations at the leaving. Just a mother resigned to her oldest son's fate. Her broken heart is revealed only after he's left and her two remaining children hear her whimpering. Classic restrained Steinbeck.

Facing the end

Steinbeck's stark writing continues as Pepé rides deeper into the harsh, unforgiving world. His world becomes progressively constricted as everything meaningful to him is stripped away. He loses mementos of his family, his horse, his rifle—eventually his humanity as he becomes an animal crawling among the rocks and dirt.

The ending is tragic, inevitable and oddly ambiguous. But one possibly positive theme is held out for some readers to latch onto. From the beginning Pepé and his family seem obsessed with what it takes to become a man. Did Pepé make the transition from childhood to manhood when he killed another person? Or as he fought for survival in the mountains? Or in his final act before death as he faced the consequences of his behaviour?

You can find several overriding themes along these lines. I'm not sure though how much of it is intended by Steinbeck to be taken this way. "Flight" feels to me more like a sad satire on that kind of thinking. Pepé himself is hopelessly naïve about his place in the world and seems to go about his life-and-death struggles nonchalantly with only that boy-becoming-a-man cliché ringing in his ears. At his lowest point, as he addresses his own end, we don't really know what's going on his heart. Is he giving up? Facing justice? Is it suicide? Some kind of atonement?

Or is it just the way things go in Pepé's world, in the world of men? Make of it what you will.

— Eric

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The Long Valley

Flight

The manly way to dusty death

Facing the end

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