Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
First Person (Central Narrator)/ John Steinbeck
This is Steinbeck's personal (if heavily fictionalized) account of his jaunt around the U.S. with his dog, so it's hardly a stunner that he's the first-person narrator of the tale. As we mentioned when it comes to his "character," Steinbeck doesn't really like to dwell too much on his inner life—but he certainly doesn't hide his opinions or the fact that all the perceptions and observations he offers are coming from a definite place of "I."
We get a good sense of what we're in for narrator-wise from the very first sentences of the story:
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight, perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. (1.1.1)
With just a few sentences injected with a healthy dose of wry humor, Steinbeck allows us to size him up pretty quickly. We can tell that he's a humorous guy who has no problem making fun of himself and his kind of "odd duck" status with respect to other people and society as a whole—which, of course, is helpful in anticipating how he's going to interact with others and his "subject." If he can make fun of himself and is already kind of an outsider among men, then he's probably going to be able to take a relatively objective, non-egotistical take on the world around him. In short: we know we can trust him, and he doesn't really mind if we laugh at him. That's something we really appreciate—since we Shmoopers are definitely the laughing kind.