John Steinbeck's "Flight", is a novel whose moral is that "you must face the consequences of your own actions". This is proclaimed in the story very clearly. Pepé kills a man and has to face the outcome. Pepé kills the man as a boy, and faces the consequences as a man. To be able to honestly tell himself that he is a man, he desperately battles himself. By the time he finally realizes that he is a man, it is too late to enjoy the value of manhood.
Facing consequences is something people deal with everyday. If I am late for class, I know I am going to have to face the consequences. A majority of all actions end with consequences. This follows the old "cause and effect" rule. The rule states that for everything you do, something is going to be effected. If I ran a mile, I'd have to confront being worn out, tired, and pain to my legs. As I type this paper, I know I lose time out of my day; but that is a consequence I am willing to deal with to get an excellent grade. In the game of basketball, if a player performs poorly, he knows his teams' effectiveness is more than likely going to be effected for the worse. He is part of the team, and if he does not do his part, the team as a whole does poorly. Then, they would in all likelihood get mad at the player, and he will face any further consequences his team decides to enact upon him.
After all that, this story is logically a story about cause and effect.
Pepé choose an action, and paid with dire consequences. Eventually
he was murdered, and his hardship was over. Through the character
of Pepé, Steinbeck left this moral for every human being who has
not experienced what he did. If Pepé was a real person, and
had done this just to establish that point, he would almost certainly be
weighed as a hero of sorts.