Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck

Published 1935 · 209 pages · 56,270 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is Tortilla Flat to read?

Tortilla Flat scores 51 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
Steinbeck writes in warm, accessible prose that captures the speech patterns of Monterey's paisanos. The vocabulary is colloquial and affectionate, conveying a community through its idiom.
Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
Sentences are often simple and direct, building through the picaresque episodes of Danny and his friends. Steinbeck's prose has the rhythm of tall tales told with a straight face.
Abstraction: 55 out of 100
The novel explores friendship, poverty, and the codes men live by through Danny, who inherits two houses and shares them with friends whose devotion to wine and adventure structures their days. Their mock-heroic lives become a celebration of those who live outside respectable society.
Information density: 50 out of 100
Monterey's paisano culture, the textures of Depression-era poverty, and the rituals of male friendship layer through the narrative. Steinbeck builds his world through accumulated attention to wine, women, and the small adventures that constitute life.
Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
The narrator frames the paisanos' adventures in mock-heroic terms that create affectionate distance. The reader must track the episodes while understanding how Steinbeck elevates petty escapades to legend.
Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
Danny's houses become symbolic of property that corrupts even as it shelters. The Round Table becomes symbolic of friendship structured as nobility. The wine becomes symbolic of the good life as the paisanos understand it.
Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
Steinbeck maintains affectionate ironic distance through the mock-heroic frame, loving his characters while gently mocking their pretensions. The novel is comic about their lives while celebrating their refusal to join respectable society.
Resolution withholding: 48 out of 100
Danny's story reaches its end; the friends scatter. Steinbeck offers the conclusion that's also an elegy for a way of life.
Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
The picaresque structure moves through episodes with clear chronology. The form is accessible, with the mock-heroic tone providing the complexity.

How Tortilla Flat is regarded

Tortilla Flat holds a literary regard score of 67 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where Tortilla Flat sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (99 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Tortilla Flat scores 72 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic, with mock-heroic romance displacement
For Danny’s house was not unlike the Round Table, and Danny’s friends were not unlike the knights of it.
Symbol: Formal, with Mythical secondary
The paisanos are clean of commercialism, free of the complicated systems of American business, and, having nothing that can be stolen, exploited, or mortgaged, that system has not attacked them very vigorously.
Mythos: Comedy phase 2 (quixotic) (comedy ii)
Better that this symbol of holy friendship, this good house of parties and fights, of love and comfort, should die as Danny died, in one last glorious, hopeless assault on the gods.
Genre: Romance + Novel
It is well that this cycle be put down on paper

Where the story of Tortilla Flat takes place

  • Tortilla Flat and Monterey, California, c. 1919-1925 (1919 to 1925), the main setting

5 things that are true of Tortilla Flat, with the passage for each

  1. Danny gets assigned as a mule skinner after joking he can drive thirty thousand mules.

    “About thirty thousand,” said the sergeant.

  2. The St Andrew's Eve treasure Pilon and Big Joe dig up is a U.S. Geodetic Survey marker.

    UNITED STATES GEODETIC SURVEY + 1915 + ELEVATION 600 FEET

  3. Pilon sells Torrelli a stolen vacuum cleaner that has no motor.

    when he hooked it up to his light wire, it would not work. So he looked on the inside, and it had no motor.

  4. The Pirate's hoard of quarters reaches 1,007 when the friends finally count it.

    there are seven over a thousand!

  5. Danny dies after falling forty feet into the gulch behind his house.

    He had fallen forty feet.

Scenes in Tortilla Flat that Frye would name

58 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Displacement, untitled
For Danny’s house was not unlike the Round Table, and Danny’s friends were not unlike the knights of it. The Arthurian myth pattern is announced as showing through paisano realism.
Pathos, untitled
When Father Ramon came out of the bedroom his face had not changed, but at sight of him the women broke into a high and terrible wail. Danny's death is announced by the priest's silent face and the women's wail.
Displacement, untitled
It must be remembered, however, that Danny is now a god. A dying drunk is turned into a nature-god through folk memory, myth emerging from realistic motive.
Anagnorisis, untitled
if that capitán, with the little epaulets and the little sash, could take my wife, imagine what a generál with a big sash and a gold sword could take! The corporal's reveal of the real logic behind his plan flips the friends' (and the reader's) understanding.
Pathos, untitled
the baby stiffened and the struggle ended. The mouth dropped open, and the baby was dead. An actual sacrificial death scene in miniature, with a wake-like response from the friends.
Sparagmos, untitled
Then Pilon tore off the blue shirt and exposed the pulpy raw back. Big Joe is beaten raw and salted by his friends for stealing from the saint's hoard.

Books that share these scenes with Tortilla Flat

About the author

John Steinbeck