Chapter I

This novel takes place in the eponymous Cannery Row, a place made up of 'junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses'. Although there is a narrative trajectory - the desire of Mack and the other boys living at the Palace Flophouse to throw a party for their friend and benefactor, Doc - the plot of this novel is really that plot of land Steinbeck describes so well.