The Moon is Down: How relationships reflect history

This novel is very big on relationships between groups of people.  The main group in this novel that has a greatly defined relationship is the soldiers and the citizens.  The soldiers think that the citizens of the town will not care that they are there.  However, they discover that the townspeople dislike them very much.  They dislike them because they took away their old way of life and they murdered some of thier friends and family.  The relationship between these two groups is so strong that the soldiers begin to fear the townspeople rather than the other way around.  This relationship is also one of the factors to the soldiers downfall, and that proves it to be very important.  This relationship is not related to history in my opinion.  It seems that in history the citizens are supposed to obey and listen to the soldiers no matter what.  Like in World War II everyone listened to Hitler even though he was not trying to acheive admirable things.  This relationship is supposed to represent that every war has a downfall, not history.

Another relationship that is represented in this novel is between man and women.  Men and women both need love, and that is proved through Tonder and Molly Morden's relationship.  First off, Tonder and Molly both show that lonliness drives men and women to get together even though they did not know each other.  Tonder did not care that Molly was a danger to him because he was so lonely.  Later in the novel, some other soldiers were talking about relationships with women and one soldier said something like, rape her, love her, or marry her, but when we call you to shoot her you better shoot her.  This represents the relationship between some men and women at this time period because soldiers were given the okay to rape women.  This time period did not make rape illegal, so it was not a big deal to soldiers to rape women.  This shows the time period because of the lack of law back then.

One last relationship represented in this novel is between worker and boss.  Mayor Orden has a butler and a cook in this novel and they do very many things for him.  He tells Annie to do many things which Annie will gladly do for him.  He tells Annie to figure out information, comfort the women who lose their man, and to risk her life to see if it is safe for him to go out at night.  This relationship represents history because more recently, we do not have cooks in households.  However, more wealthy people might, but they are only a cook, not a errand runner like Annie.  Another way to look at the boss-worker relationship is between Colonal Lanser and his soldiers.  Colonel Lanser does not really help his soldiers out when they need it.  This shows that Orden is a better leader because he gets more out of his workers than Lanser does.

Steinbeck, John. The Moon Is Down. New York: Penguin Classics, 1942. Print.