The Red Pony: Death and Rebirth The pony still lay on its side and the wound in its throat bellowed in and out. When Jody saw how dry and dead the hair looked, she finally knew there was no hope for the pony. . .he had seen it [the dead hair] before, and knew it was a sure sign of death." In Steinbeck's The Red Pony, death played an intricate role in the life of Jody, a teenage farmer's daughter. With the recurring theme of the association of death with violence, we are ultimately able to discover that from such a horrific incident a rebirth of life can be formed, Steinbeck's classic tale of a young boy's coming of age and his own initiation into adulthood, this sense of life and rebirth played harmonious roles together. As a typical ten-year-old boy in a Western farming village, Jody essentially felt the need to justify his manhood and prove to his parents that he was only could handle immense responsibilities that others his age could handle. To test this exact faith, a horse, named Gabilan, was handed over to Jody by his father, ironically named Carl Tifflin instead of "daddy". The horse, in fact, turned out to be Steinbeck's recurring message for the rest of the novel. Testing the patience between man and the horse, and also the boy's great love for the beastly animal, we learn the need to develop the discipline to deal with life and death and the violence associated with it. With death. of the horse came the arrival of an old Mexican, who also found himself at the crossroads of his life. The man claimed that he had come to the mountainous region to die in the place where he was born. Jody's immediate reaction to Gitano, as he was called, appears... halfway down the paper... must now be related to his life. All of Jody's experiences surrounding the violent death of his precious horse, Gabilan, served to prepare him for an eventual balanced acceptance of life and death. Realistically, Jody knew the pony would die: "When Jody saw how dry and dead the hair looked, she finally knew there was no hope for the pony." But as prepared as he seemed to be for death, he still had to put up some resistance. This is expressed when he "hit" the head of the "upright buzzard" as punishment for harming his beloved animal. This bloody attack on the buzzards at the end of the story indicated his irrational and emotional rejection of the violent aspects of nature. This aspect is what the Red Pony's death helped Jody realize, for although her friend was dead, a new rebirth of insight into maturity had entered her mind...