Jones 13
Jim Jones
College English
Mr. Kirsten
April 25, 2008
Outline: The Grapes of Wrath
Thesis: In The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, the author uses rich characterization and stunning realism to convey the power of community and the importance of dignity in a decade of struggle and change.
I. Steinbeck accomplishes this through:
A. Realism
B. Showing transition in society
C. Strong characterization
II. Realism
A. Ethical choices main subject
1. Ma giving soup to children
2. Personal gain over benefit of community
a. Corporations
b. Tractor driver taking care of own family versus someone else’s
B. Importance of Class
1. Division between landowners and those who do not own land- Ferments anger and desire for change
C. Passages showing the “big picture”
1. Foreshadows events to come
2. Shows hardships of displaced families and communities
III. Transition from small community to corporate robot
A. The turtle
1. Travels southwest, in direction of migration
2. Encounters setbacks-Driver swerves to hit car
3. Turtle shell strong and able to withstand- Strength of humanity in adversity
B. Farmers concerned with car, not crops
C. Migrants find comfort, protection, and hope in community
IV. Strong characters
A. Tom Joad
1. Protagonist
2. Undergoes change from “I” to “we”
3. Spirit of unionization and community
C. Jim Casy
1. Preaching the strength of numbers
2. Believes, not in a deity, but in the power of people
a. Union organization
b. Sacrifices self for Joad family
V. Conclusion
A. Value of community, human spirit in adversity
B. John Steinbeck’s foothold in realism creates a dramatic and compelling story through matter-of-fact writing
C. Journey shows transition of society
D. Characters symbolize elements of human spirit and are vessels for Steinbeck’s message of community
Jim Jones
College English
Mr. Kirsten
April 24, 2008
Harvesting The Grapes Of Wrath
A sense of community and individual dignity and quality of life is essential for any healthy society and its members. In The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, the author uses rich characterization and stunning realism to convey the power of community and the importance of dignity in a decade of struggle and change. Steinbeck’s true-to-life style of writing takes an unglamorous and realistic view of the Dust Bowl migration, noting the ethical choices that wealthy landowners make and the migrants must face. Their journey epitomizes the transition from a small, individualized society to a united response to large companies. Steinbeck uses his characters to fully realize the benefit of a strong, united family and community. John Steinbeck weaves a story of simplistic and reverent truth, using metaphor and allegory as a medium of expression.
One of the most influential literary movements of Steinbeck’s time was realism, and its effects are seen throughout The Grapes of Wrath. According to librarian Patricia Penrose, “At its basic level, realism was grounded in the faithful reporting of all facets of everyday American life” (Penrose 1). It is important to recognize that, at the time Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, America was just recovering from the effects of the Dust Bowl. Part of the appeal of the novel was founded in the personal experiences shared by many Americans. Penrose notes that “readers were attracted to the realists because they saw their own struggles in print” (Penrose 1). The elements of realism create a simplistic yet poignant story of survival.
One of the most important aspects of realism is its focus on the complicated tango of ethical decisions and human dignity. In The Grapes of Wrath, the circumstances of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl gave rise to a need for personal gain over the benefit of the community. Owners of large farms in California are depicted as greedy and inhumane, interested only in the profit, not the meaning, of the land. As thousands of starving migrants pour into the state, the wealthy landowners go to cruel lengths to prevent them from taking the food that is not theirs.
Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. (Steinbeck 349)
In this passage, Steinbeck uses verisimilitude to convey the true horror the Okies faced upon their arrival in California. Because profit cannot be taken from the food, the landowners choose to destroy it rather than give it freely to the starving families. Steinbeck condemns it in the following passage, saying:
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroner must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. (349)
Steinbeck utilizes imagery such as this to allow readers to empathize with the despair of the Okies. The reader can feel the anger and resentment building against the cruelty of the companies, which will inevitably explode.
Even the members of the working class feel the pressure to provide for themselves rather than give to the greater good in the face of starvation and despair. In the Dust Bowl, companies hired tractor drivers to evict the tenants. In one pictorial scene, a newly displaced tenant, symbolic of the myriad number of farmers in the same situation, asks a tractor driver how he can only think of himself when there are hundreds of homeless people whose despair he contributed to. “’Can’t think of that. Got to think of my own kids. Three dollars a day, and it comes every day…Crop land isn’t for little guys like us any more’” (Steinbeck 37). This scene is representative of the selfish attitude the corporations inflict on the working class. Similarly, the Joads must confront difficult moral conflicts on their journey to and in California.
Human dignity is a deeply addressed element of humanity in The Grapes of Wrath. Ma Joad experiences the negative aspect of pride the day they arrive at their first “home”, a ramshackle Hooverville in the fertile valleys of California. As she begins to cook stew for the family’s supper, A group of children gather in a “lusting circle” (Steinbeck 253) around her, and Ma asks if any of them had breakfast. A small boy boasts that he did, but when he leaves, the children tell her that he didn’t, that he eats poorly like everybody else. “Oh him! He was a-braggin’. High an’ mighty… Las’ night, come out an’ says they got chicken to eat. Well, sir, I looked in whilst they was a-eatin’ an’ it was fried dough jus’ like ever’body else” (Steinbeck 253). Even in times of great need, people from the oldest person to the youngest are reluctant to admit that they are suffering. The displaced families clung to what dignity and pride they could, even if it meant going hungry.
Ironically, this focus on the self instigated a greater change in American society. As the Joads experienced the trials of solitude, they came to the realization that it was often of greater benefit to unite with others and present a stronger front. According to an article in The New Criterion, “The Depression had taken the individualistic American farming family and turned it into a proletariat with a new set of collectivist values” (Windschuttle 24). Ma Joad’s experience with a corporate store clerk epitomizes this working class revolution. After a day of work picking peaches, she goes to the company store to buy a dollar’s worth of food. However, the prices are so inflated that she can barely afford enough for her family. The clerk mocks the peach pickers, appearing to delight in the suffering of others. Ma sees through his flippant and arrogant manner, revealing his shame at taking advantage of his own people when he could easily be in their shoes. He lends her a dime, his way of showing the migrants support. As Ma exits the store, she turns around and says, “’I’m learnin’ one thing good…Learnin’ it all the time, ever’ day. If you’re in trouble or hurt or need—go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help—the only ones’” (Steinbeck 176). The revolutionary change in society is exemplified through the poor helping the poor, the needy helping the needy. Steinbeck’s literary strategies vary widely, from examples like the poor clerk, to compelling symbolism.
The turtle in the first chapters of The Grapes of Wrath is a symbol for the strength of the human spirit in adversity, and serves to foreshadow events to come. His journey parallels that of the Joad’s. The turtle travels southwest, in the same direction the Joads travel. He encounters many setbacks, including a truck driver that swerves to hit it and a steep, rocky embankment. However, the turtle is resilient and strong. It does not move quickly, but it moves nonetheless. It cuts a deep track through the dust, eventually being picked up by Tom. This interaction carries the turtle from the broad pictorial scenes into the personal story of the Joads, effectively connecting the family to a greater movement, a greater community. When Tom releases the turtle, he questions the turtle’s motives. “’Where the hell you s’pose he’s goin’? . . . I seen turtles all my life. They’re always goin’ someplace. They always seem to want to get there’” (Steinbeck 44). The turtle is a metaphor for the wandering Okie families, who are always dreaming of a final destination, and hoping for a better future.
The 1930s was a decade of transition in America. Farming had become more and more about profit and less and less about the spiritual connection to the land. When the displaced migrants arrived in California, “They found an agriculture even more depersonalized than the one they had left . . .” (Leuchtenburg 44). The migrants focus turns from land and crops to machines and money as they scramble to make it in a hastily advancing society. Steinbeck uses a horse and a tractor as metaphors for human life and the cold lifelessness of a heartless corporation:
. . . When a horse stops work and goes into the barn there is a life and a vitality left, there is a breathing and a warmth, and the feet shift on the straw…But when the motor of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it like the living heat that leaves a corpse (Steinbeck 115).
In the same way, the families of the Dust Bowl must adapt to the modern concepts of a rapidly industrializing era.
The Joad family transitions from the spiritual connection to the land to the necessity of industrial progress the moment they begin their journey. Of the Okie, Steinbeck writes:
And his thought and his worry were not any more with rainfall, with wind and dust, with the thrust of the crops. Eyes watched the tires, ears listened to the clattering motors, and minds struggled with oil, with gasoline, with the thinning rubber between air and road. (Steinbeck 196)
As the land dies, the automobile becomes the life force, the “new hearth, the living center of the family” (Steinbeck 100). Progressing technology redefines the meaning of family, and even the meaning of want and need.
As America became more industrialized, many people were caught in a corporate trap, and were unable to think or feel for themselves. “If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank—or the Company—needs—wants—insists—must have—as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling . . .” (Steinbeck 31-2). This modernized way of thinking effectually severed the bank or company from humanity itself. Steinbeck expresses his disgust at the selfish greed of property owners, saying,
If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results . . . you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I’, and cuts you off forever from the ‘we’. (Steinbeck 152)
Steinbeck believes that large companies could never understand the hardships and pain of the poor. They fear the large contingencies of people, and fear that they will unite. It is this fear that prevents them from sympathy or pity, and so they prefer to protect their own self-interests.
The greed of the corporations ultimately led to their downfall. The large companies would buy out fallow land from small farmers, and quickly monopolized the markets. The starving migrants, desperate for work, resented the power the authorities tried to exercise over them. “And the companies, the banks worked at their doom and did not know it . . . The companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line” (Steinbeck 284). The more power the companies exercised over the migrants, the more resentment and rebellion built.
Ironically, fear of rebellion would become the cause of it. The harder the police fought to repress the migrants, the harder the migrants fought back. In California, the endearing term “Okie” had become an insult, a synonym for vagrants and criminals. In the same way, the very culture of the Oklahoma farmers had become an aberration and a crime. The oppressed farmers could only bear the injustice for so long before they fought back, resulting in a movement for the unionization of workers. Tom Joad and Jim Casy are perhaps the two most important leaders in the movement.