When he had finished combing his hair he moved into the room, and he moved with a majesty only achieved by royalty and master craftsmen. He was a jerkline skinner, the prince of the ranch, capable of driving ten, sixteen, even twenty mules with a single line to the leaders.
Chapter 2 · Narrator
Context
Slim, the lead skinner, enters the bunk house for the first time. The narrator devotes an unusually long passage to his bearing and skills.
Analysis
The diction abruptly elevates—'majesty,' 'royalty,' 'master craftsmen,' 'prince'—importing a feudal vocabulary into a Depression-era bunk house, and the comparative structure 'only achieved by' insists on Slim's exceptionality rather than describing him directly. The juxtaposition is deliberately dissonant: Steinbeck applies aristocratic registers to mule-driving in order to relocate nobility from social position to demonstrated competence, an essentially democratic gesture that nonetheless retains the hierarchical syntax it inverts.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck's idealization of skilled manual labor constitutes a populist counter-aristocracy—Slim's 'princely' framing argues that the only legitimate authority is craftsmanship, an argument that implicitly delegitimizes the boss whose high-heeled boots earlier in the chapter merely simulate non-labor.