The Canary & Class in McTeague

At the end of McTeague, the titular character is far from San Francisco and has even left his mining job in Placer County far behind him. McTeague is in Death Valley, where he still referred to as the dentist as he carries the little gilded cage with his canary inside. The canary is his attempt to try and keep the semblance of a higher class that he thinks he once had, which had been caused by the false sense of wealth when he had obtained Trina's lottery money. The canary is the ornament of class and is representative of consumerism. But in the harsh Death Valley everything is falling apart and being crushed by nature, much the way the little cage is crushed when McTeague and Marcus struggle and fall on the cage. Additionally, as McTeague is wandering through the desert, oftentimes only the cage is mentioned and not the actual canary, until the very end when the canary is chirping its last cheeps.