“Pigs…are the most headstrong and heretic of beasts”
The metaphorical implication here within the immediate context is that pigs differ from lions - lions being created almost ideally suitable for use in parables. The pig, on the other hand, responds to little motivation but violent conditioning. Irony and sarcastic commentary on religious dogma abounds within the larger complexities of this metaphor.
The Big Valley
Every story in this collection except “Saint Katy the Virgin” takes place in the same general regional area of California. The valleys of California are as closely associated with Steinbeck as Mississippi is with Faulkner or the horrors of Stephen King’s New England. The opening line in the very first story of the collection sets a metaphorical scene appropriate for the entire volume. (Except the one about the pig.)
“The high grey-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world.”
Mob Thinking
“The Vigilante” tells the story of Mike, a single participant in mob justice that results in a lynching. Almost every line in the narrative points toward allegory, however, as Mike becomes not just a one of many nor even the symbolic personification of a collective, but rather a metaphor for how “mob thinking” makes victims of everyone involved as Mike realizes when his sense of identity has depleted along with the fury:
“The moment he left the outskirts of the mob a cold loneliness fell upon him.”
Ironic Foreshadowing
“The Murder” has a title that pretty much gives away the story. The question becomes who is the murdered and who is the murderer. This information means that the story is probably not really so much about the murder itself as it is about something else. That something else is foreshadowed early on in an ironic way with a seemingly dismissive and mostly meaningless description of a husband’s treatment of his wife. It should not be dismissed because it is most certainly not meaningless. In fact, this one sentence divulges thematic information upon which the entire plot hinges.
“She was so much like an animal that sometimes Jim patted her head and neck under the same impulse that made him stroke a horse.”
“The Harness”
The title of this story refers to a knitted harness made by a wife for her husband with the intent of literally keeping him upright. The real purpose of the harness, however, is pure metaphor: to remind him to stay morally upright for 51 weeks out of the year in exchange for one week of unsupervised debauchery.
