Steinbeck’s description of Mike’s gentle pain and dull quality of loneliness is heightened when Mike enters a local bar and relives the event with a sympathetic and empathetic bartender named Welch.
Mike’s account reveals his morally ambiguous feelings at his participation in this event: Dare he think it a crime? His initial feelings, as the story begins after the lynching, include an emptiness at no longer being a member of the mob. Steinbeck transforms the event into the story of Mike, a participant in a lynch mob who administers arbitrary justice to a black man just as the residents of San Jose lynched two accused white men in revenge for the death of Brooke Hart, the son of a local businessman, whose mutilated body was found in the San Francisco harbor after a ransom plan for his return went wrong. John Steinbeck’s “The Vigilante,” as the earlier “The Snake”-both appearing in the story collection The Long Valley (1938)-has its roots in an actual event, a tragic kidnapping and murder that occurred in San Jose in 1933. Analysis of John Steinbeck’s The Vigilante
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