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Who was the Hero?

For our English 1 class, we had to compare and contrast between very interesting and relative characters. These characters face minority struggles as well as oppression. Enjoy!

Kino vs. Chris: Who was the Hero?
Kino and Chris are both fathers of struggling families. They try to make ends meet, but does one father hurt their family more than supporting? Who is the hero and who is villain? Both experience struggles in their life, but they respond and handle the situations in two opposite ways. In John Steinbeck’s book The Pearl, Kino faces adversity against society and himself. Chris also experiences the same minority troubles in the film, The Pursuit of Happyness by Steven Conrad. But, one father will take on the struggles while one will beat up on the people around him. One man will harness the anger inside of him and uses it as motivation to strive for the job. One man will take it out on others, eventually committing homicide and assaulting his wife. The question is who will be the hero and save his family, or who will make their lives worse than they were before?
Kino lives and breathes in a very divided culture. He lives beside the ocean in a wooden shack, along with many others of the same native culture. He spends his days looking for pearls in the Sea of Cortez. This is along the coast of Baja California near Mexico. He lives in poverty and is looked down upon the surrounding communities of foreigners. By living in his shack along the shore, this allows all wildlife to enter into his shack. A deadly scorpion rests on the laying box of Coyotito, the baby of Juana and Kino, and strikes him in the shoulder. This causes venom to enter into the system and could kill him. The situation seems to be awful as he cannot receive treatment from the local doctor as he calls his people “animals.” To receive treatment, Kino searches for a way to get money. He decides to dive into the sea and look for a pearls. He finds a glowing clam, that ends up being the pearl, that is greater than any pearl and will make him rich. Although he does find the pearl, the buyers would not give him full value and wouldn’t buy his pearl because of his minority race and lack of intelligence. Many people come to steal the precious pearl, causing Kino to become enraged. As more and more people try to steal the pearl, Kino uses his knife to commit a homicide or two. He even gets angry at his wife, who tries to help him, and kicks her in the side. They concluded that the way to get full value of his pearl is to visit the capital, so he heads with his family to the other side of the sea to the capital city. As he crosses the wilderness with the baby and Juana, he encounters the hunters that will surely try to steal the pearl. As they find them and hunt them down, they shoot Coyotito, the baby, in the head. After losing their only child, they went back to the Sea of Cortez, they threw the pearl back into the ocean.
Kino in the beginning of the story was a very calm and collected man. But, one trait he shows is that he can’t keep his anger to himself and unleashes his anger onto others. He risks his whole life on this very pearl. It brings curses of theft and murder as Kino becomes greedy to support his family. Kino is not the caregiver of Coyotito as Juana, the wife of Kino, takes care of the baby and tries to calm down Kino and his anger flare-ups. As the story goes on, he begins to lose his ability to not release all of his anger. As more and more troubles arise, he becomes more and more angry at others and himself. The anger and frustration becomes too much that he throws the very thing that gives him hope back into the ocean. Now, Kino and his family have no money, a house that is burned down, and no other possessions. He has become the villain his family as he made his family more poor and causes their only child to be killed.
Chris is a salesman for a bone-density scanner in San Francisco, California. He lives with his wife and son in a low-end apartment, trying to make ends meet with his job and his wife working as a maid. Why are they living in a low-end apartment and struggling? Chris has troubles selling his pointless $250 scanners as hospitals can use x-rays instead. He has to sell one or two a month to pay for rent and food. Things get worse as more and more people aren’t buying his equipment, and his wife left him because of the current situation. She never believed in his dreams and always complained about his troubles. She tries to take his son away from him, but he refuses. In frustration of his life, he looks for any ways to sell his scanners. He goes in front of a tall skyscraper in San Francisco, a stockbroker agency. He sees a man that is very happy as he goes into the building. Chris questions him saying why is he so happy and where can he get a job like that. The man replied with an internship opportunity, that allows only one of the interns would advance into the company and get a job. The job was stressful and time consuming as it took up Chris’s whole day. This makes picking up his son, Christopher, a challenge. As he tries to provide for Christopher, he gets more frustrated because the internship doesn’t pay and Chris cannot sell the bone-density scanners. Chris and Christopher are forced out of their apartment and of their hotel that they can’t pay for. Chris owes $500 in fines or tickets. He became poor, only having $21 and a few odd cents in his wallet to provide for both Christopher and himself. In desperation, he and Christopher go to a homeless shelter and spend their nights there. While living in the shelter, Chris becomes more and more frustrated with life, but he uses this to drive his attitude at work to do all of his work in a 7 hour time frame instead of a 9 hour time frame normal employees work. Chris is eventually chosen to work for the stockbroker company. Chris becomes rich off an investment with another big company.
Chris and his family were the normal lower class citizens of San Francisco, but their lives just get harder and harder until Chris and Christopher both become homeless and unable to provide for themselves. Chris could have just taken the homeless shelter and called it good, but he didn’t want homelessness for his son’s future. He wanted his son to grow up like his dad and to remember his dad. Christopher uses his morals and the struggles as a force to drive him to succeed in the broker agency. This allows him to get a paying job that will support him and his family.
Seeing Chris in The Pursuit of Happyness and Kino in The Pearl, it seems obvious that Kino is our villain to his family in the book. The reasons why he is a villain are simply because he harms his family physically, and he hurts their reputation and loses their home and all that they have. He also lost his canoe because of the pearl. His greediness for an education for his son and the strive for an actually wedding in a church, causes his anger to flare up when trouble arises. But, seeing Chris in The Pursuit of Happyness, we see that Chris wants a good education for his son Christopher. This is also seen in The Pearl along with their pursuit of riches to provide for their families. They don’t have the luxurious jobs in the world. Kino is a pearl diver and Chris is a salesman for a product that isn’t useful. They both also face minority struggles as Kino is the Native American of the Spanish culture on the shores of the Sea of Cortez. Chris is an African American who lives in San Francisco. They both try to provide for their families and do become more angry as the plot goes on. But only Chris succeeds because he could control his anger and use it for productivity.
In conclusion, there are numerous similarities between The Pearl and The Pursuit of Happyness. They both resemble similar characters with similar backgrounds. They both experience similar struggles and challenges. But only one actually became rich, while the other man lived in sorrow and regret as they didn’t sell the pearl, while having a burnt house and possessions and a tough future ahead of them.

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