The Octopus: A Story of California

The sound of the train haunts the very first sentence of the novel. It displaces time, leaving Presley unsure of the hour. The reverberation stands only as a marker of the train’s presence, but this presence never once relents through the course of the story. By the end of the first chapter, Presley has fully characterized the presence with a roiling list of descriptors that emulates the continual churning of the train, as “the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus” (51).

While an octopus symbolizes the insidious and expansive reach of the Railroad, very little of this depiction has to do with the actual animal or what is known of the animal’s behavior. The symbol likely draws inspiration from the portrayals of the Railroad from a magazine from Norris’s youth: F. Frederick Keller’s 1882 illustration “The Curse of California“ depicts a huge octopus crawling across the land, holding in each of its tentacles farmers, shippers, and growers, while at its head sit the Railroad bosses; the beast is tattooed with the words “RAILROAD MONOPOLY.” Scholars speculate that this image was the original inspiration for Norris’s symbol (Brown, Richard Maxwell.