Who is gitano in the red pony

There will be no violence as there was in "The Gift"; now only a presence, unexplained, will cause the Tiflins concern and leave Jody a changed boy. The presence will be that of an old Mexican man, a peasant type who says that he has come home to the mountains to die.

The appearance of this stranger affects Jody greatly. The appearance of any stranger is unusual, but there seems to be a special mystery surrounding this old man's sudden appearance and his explanation of why he has come to the Tiflin ranch. In addition, the isolation of the farm, the tedium of life there, and Jody's recent musing about the great mountains make this a momentous event.

Literarily, the old man is a universal type of figure who can be found in all of world literature; he is the wandering Jew of legends, the symbol of Old Father Death, and also the eternal wanderer. Jody's immediate reaction is confusion, embarrassment, excitement, and helplessness in the face of an actual mystery.

Before, he had only been toying and dreaming of the mysterious; now the mystery is immediate and present before him. There is a sense of unreality to the old man's chant-like phrases; his words are flat and blunt: "I am Gitano and I have come back.

Fittingly, he points toward the west, long a symbol of death's domain. When Billy Buck and Carl Tiflin arrive to view the old Mexican, the paisano is resting, and you should note Steinbeck's description of the old man: "his whole body had sagged into a timeless repose.

As readers, we have seldom seen anyone on the Tiflin ranch in "timeless repose. Billy Buck is always busy; in "The Gift," when he lays down the horse brush and the currycomb before he goes up to breakfast, Steinbeck says that his action was deliberate and "wasteless of time.

Tiflin is continually described as preparing meals, cleaning food, or washing dishes; even the dogs are described as often lowering their noses to the ground in a "businesslike way. We have seen that boredom never eases him into "timeless repose. Now, into the midst of this time-oriented cluster of people has come a stranger, someone who no longer measures time. Living, for him, is not nearly as important now as is his preparing for dying. One often does not know what to do with strangers, especially old strangers — the women collecting at the door for various charities or the pamphlet-carrying evangelists — for we have, besides embarrassment, a guilt if we do not aid them in a small way before sending them away.

This awe in the presence of a stranger is archetypal; even the Greeks recognized the perplexity of the emotions when dealing with such a situation. Their solution was simple, however: just in case the stranger might be a god in disguise, be courteous, feed him and bed him, and then send him on his way. Carl Tiflin, however, has no illusions about the old man's being a god.

On the contrary, at the Tiflin ranch, Carl is the god, as it were. He makes the rules and wields the rod. Now, in the presence of his wife, son, and cow-hand, he must reveal a weakness that he does not like displayed to his family or to himself. He stated emphatically "we can't have him," but the old Mexican's stoic statements eroded even Carl's demand that "you won't stay. Steinbeck tells us that Carl didn't like to be cruel, but that he felt he must.

He is attempting to preserve the status quo of his day-to-day living. Food is raised and eaten and sold for the sake of the Tiflins — and this includes no strange beggar. But, face-to-face with the pathetic, enigmatic man, Carl retreats from his position of absolute authoritarianism. Food and a bed for the night — then the old man must go.

The basic plot of the story is a universal type of situation. For example, the American poet Robert Frost wrote a very popular poem called "The Death of the Hired Man," centered around a man who has come home to die on a farm very close to where he has blood relations; in Frost's poem, the farmer is harsh about feeding a useless old man, while the wife is much more sympathetic.

In Steinbeck's story, old Gitano has also come home to die. Gitano's desire to return to be near the mountains, to become again a part of the land where he was born, to re-emerge with nature at his death, and to find acceptance before his death creates within the reader an instant sympathy for the old paisano. Carl Tiflin's inability to accept the old man, then, becomes the symbolic plight of many old people whom society casts off.

If possible, Carl would perhaps keep the paisano, but he knows that the ranch will not support another person, and his realism cannot justify keeping a person who has relatives in the nearby town. He is particularly incapable of understanding the mystical reasons why a person would return to the place of his birth in order to die there. Thus, to disguise his harshness and confusion, he tries to make jokes about the old man and the old horse, Easter.

He eventually does the very thing he feared most: He "was afraid he might relent and let the old man stay. Uniquely, Grandfather's tales are of "westering" and his experiences leading a wagon train across the Great Plains to California.

While Jody is riveted by Grandfather's tales of Indians and gun fights, Carl Tiflin is infinitely annoyed by the repetitious stories and treats Grandfather rudely. At the end of the story, Grandfather tries to express to Jody the importance of "westering" to his generation and how he was privileged to lead the people.

Grandfather's ideals represent Steinbeck's fascination with collective behavior. Grandfather tells Jody: "It was a whole bunch of people made into one big crawling beast.

And I was the head" Jody longs to lead the people some day too, but Grandfather tells him that, sadly, the collective spirit is now dead. Jess Taylor: Jess Taylor, the owner of a nearby ranch, collects five dollars from Jody to mate his stallion, Sundog, with their mare, Nellie, in "The Promise. Gabilan : Jody's first colt, in "The Gift," is muscled and red, with spirited, fiery eyes. This horse, purchased from a sheriff's auction in Salinas, would never grow to be old enough to ride.

Though Jody cares for his pony as Billy Buck instructs him, Gabilan gets seriously ill and goes through an agonizingly long death brought on by the "strangles. Gabilan's is the first of the deaths and great losses that Jody experiences as readers follow him on his journey of maturation. Nellie, in heat, is taken up the road to Jess Taylor's ranch to mate with the stallion, Sundog. The mating is successful and Jody suffers through the long pregnancy with impatience and anxiety.

Eventually Nellie goes into labor and Billy Buck discovers her colt is breech. Remembering his inability to save Gabilan, Billy Buck kills Nellie with two hammer blows to the head and delivers her colt by Cesarean. Sundog : Jess Taylor's stallion is introduced in "The Promise" as he breaks free from his corral and violently mates with Nellie. Doubletree Mutt: One of the Tiflins' ranch dogs, Doubletree Mutt has a big thick tail and yellow eyes, and is often on the receiving end of many of Jody's tricks and childhood cruelties.

These are the ideas and philosophies of those who believe life to be non-teleological. A famous literary example of a non-teleologist is a man named John Steinbeck. Throughout his life Steinbeck experimented with Darwinism, transcendentalism, realism.

Everyone has sentimentality for something or another. In the novel The Red Pony, the thing that Gitano is sentimental about is his childhood home. The author John Steinbeck creates a character, Gitano, whose depression and sentimentality leads him back to the area of his childhood home.

It is here that he must try to convince the Tiflins to allow him to stay at their home and work for them until he dies. When Gitano realizes that they will not let him stay, he ditches his bags and leaves. Gitano is all-in-all just a sentimental, homeless old man.

Gitano arrives uninvited to the Tiflins ranch one day saying that he used to live there. I was born here, and my father, too. Get Access. Read More. Looking Back By John Steinbeck Words 9 Pages More often than not, the experiences and memories that one undergoes as he or she grows up become the basis and storyline of their fiction writing. Popular Essays.