The "failure" as the hero of Cannery RowIt is Doc, in Cannery Row, who provides the objective and non-teleological point of view that we find in so many of Steinbeck's works. Because Doc, himself freed from the “get-get-get” philosophy of the machine world by his science, his detachment, his gentleness and his personal refusal to be pushed either towards social importance or towards role of social judge, insists that the boys of the Palace Flophouse are universal symbols rather than simple rascals. And what they symbolize is simply this: the madness of a world in which those who get the most out of life are those the world considers "failures." For Mack and the boys are most certainly failures – in everything except humanity and life itself: Mack and the boys. . . are the virtues, the graces, the beauties of the mutilated and hasty madness of Monterey and of the cosmic Monterey where frightened and hungry men destroy their stomachs in the struggle to obtain a certain food, where men hungry for love destroy everything that is lovable in them. . . In a world ruled by ulcer-ridden tigers, smashed by shrunken bulls, plundered by blind jackals, Mac and the boys delicately dine with the tigers, pet the panicked heifers, and bag the crumbs to feed the seagulls of Cannery Row. What good is it for a man to conquer the whole world and arrive home with a gastric ulcer, a swollen prostate and bifocals? Mack and the boys avoid the trap and step over the poison. . . I think they survive better than others in this particular world. In a time when people tear each other apart with ambition, nervousness and lust, they are relaxed. All our so-called successful men are sick men, with stomach aches and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and oddly clean. They can do whatever they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them otherwise. And the final paradox of all, Doc continues (a paradox that baffles Ethan Hawley in The Winter of Our Discontent), is the fact that virtues like honesty, spontaneity, and kindness are - in the machine world - almost