The Dead Pony: A Critical Analysis — or Scenes from an 8th Grade English Class

John Steinbeck's Father with the Red Pony Foal, circa 1906

I don't recall why it happened, but several years ago, shortly after my father died, I spent an evening reading John Steinbeck's The Red Pony. The story moved me, and I awoke at 2:00 a.m. and read it again. It stirred a lot of stuff—partly about the role of a father. Certainly, there had been a bit of Carl Tiflin in my own father's life. At the time, as the father of two teenagers, I might have reluctantly confessed there may have been a trace or two of Carl in myself. But there was a lot more going on with this little book. The clarity, preciseness, and simplicity of the writing were striking. Steinbeck was doing something marvelous—but I wasn't sure what. It haunted me.

At the Steinbeck Festival in Salinas a couple of years later, my wife and I took "The Red Pony Tour" out to the ranch that helped inspire the story. On our little tour van and at different sites around the ranch, our elderly guide read selected excerpts from the book as he explained that the story was about this young boy Jody learning to take responsibility in life. I had some doubts about this being the central message and left feeling unsatisfied.

When I read Jay Parini's biography of Steinbeck, I was shocked that this tended to be his view as well. He too puts the emphasis on what he calls "Jody's movement towards responsibility" as he writes, "The Red Pony is really a brief, episodic novel in which Steinbeck traces the emotional development of a boy, Jody Tiflin, from the narrow self-concern typical of children to a more compassionate view of the world" (214). While acknowledging issues such as trust, human fallibility, and aging, he dismisses the adult characters as "stereotypical" and comes back to "Jody's responsibilities" and the life lessons in the boy's "gradual maturation" (215). Parini's comments seemed to miss some of the essence of the book.

As a teacher, I would later discover, bewildered but not surprised, that this same focus—Jody learning to take responsibility—is central in the official teaching materials that accompany student copies of the text for schools from the publisher Penguin Books/Perma-Bound.

I continued to sense much more going on in the stories. Lessons in responsibility seemed secondary to what Steinbeck was doing. Yet at this point, I wound up putting the book aside until another time.

Had I persevered a bit further, I would have read Jackson J. Benson's landmark biography on Steinbeck. Benson touches on some wonderful areas of the book, as I would later discover. As he chronicles Steinbeck's childhood in his very first chapter, Benson notes its parallels with ten-year-old Jody Tiflin's, focusing on the spring on the hillside overlooking his grandparents' ranch—"a special place where he [Steinbeck] could be alone with his thoughts and where the sound of water might bring renewal" (9). He cites Steinbeck's similar description of the spring as "a center-point for Jody." Drawing parallels with The Red Pony, Benson also highlights Steinbeck's view of life as a process of learning, requiring adaptability and sometimes great suffering and trauma (251). In connection, Benson writes further that "the Red Pony stories seemed to act as a moral fulcrum. These stories, with their child observer, examine the nature of life and of death and the relationship of the individual to the whole" (288). Here Benson presents still a third idea: "On each side of this foundation hang in balance two versions of adult life—the tight, rigid, and often frustrated pattern of middle-class living in the valley, and the relaxed, loose, and usually loving pattern of the lower-class paisanos on the coast" (288). Benson's insights variously reflect a sensitivity to the material that would have served as a confirmation of some of my own...