BOOK TO READ: THE GRAPES OF WRATH

The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. The book won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in 1962.

Book Summary

In Depression-era Oklahoma, Tom Joad hitchhikes home after being paroled from the state penitentiary. Along the road, he encounters Jim Casy, a preacher Tom remembers from childhood. Casy explains that he is no longer a preacher, having lost his calling. He still believes in the Holy Spirit, but not necessarily the spirituality mandated by organized religion. For Casy, the Holy Spirit is love. Not just the love of God or Jesus, but the love of all humans. He maintains that all people are holy, everyone being part of the whole soul of humankind. Tom invites Casy to join him on his walk home.

When they arrive at what was once the Joad farm, Tom and Casy find it abandoned. Muley Graves, a Joad neighbor, approaches and tells Tom that his family has been tractored off their land by the bank. They have moved in with his Uncle John and are preparing to leave for California to find work. Tom and Casy spend the night near the deserted farm and head to Uncle John's early the next morning.

The family is preparing for their journey to California when Tom and Casy arrive. Casy asks whether he can journey west with the Joads. The Joads agree to take him along. Once their belongings have been sold, everyone except Granpa is anxious to get started. They pack the truck, but Granpa has decided he wants to stay on the land, and they must drug Granpa in order to get him in the truck. They are on the highway by dawn.

The family stops that first evening next to a migrant couple whose car has broken down. The Wilsons are gracious, offering their tent to Granpa who has a stroke and dies. Tom and Al fix the Wilson's car, and the two families decide to travel together.

In New Mexico, the Wilson's touring car breaks down again, and the families are forced to stop. Granma has become increasingly ill since Granpa's death, and Tom suggests the others take the truck and continue on. Ma refuses to go, insisting that the family stay together. She picks up the jack handle to support her point, and the rest of the family gives in. As they reach the desert bordering California, Sairy Wilson becomes so ill that she is unable to continue. The Joads leave the Wilsons and continue across the California desert on their own.

Granma's health continues to deteriorate, and as the truck starts its nighttime trek across the desert, Ma knows that Granma will not survive. Knowing that they cannot afford to stop, Ma lies in the back of the truck with Granma. Midway across the desert, Granma dies. By dawn, the Joads have climbed out of the desert and stop the truck to gaze down upon the beautiful Bakersfield valley. Ma tells them that Granma has passed. She must be buried a pauper because the family does not have enough money to bury her.

The Joads stop at the first camp they come to, a dirty Hooverville of tents and makeshift shelters. The men are talking to Floyd Knowles, a young man in the camp, when a businessman accompanied by a cop offers them work. When Floyd asks for a wage offer in writing, he is accused of being a "red," and the cop attempts to arrest him. Tom trips the cop, and Casy kicks him. When the cop regains consciousness, Casy gives himself up to the law in order to divert attention away from Tom. The Joads immediately leave to avoid any further trouble.

The Joads travel south to a government-run camp in Weedpatch. Here, the community governs itself, electing committees to deal with clean-up, discipline, and entertainment. The Joads are comfortable but, after a month, are still unable to find any work and realize they must move on.

They are offered work picking peaches in Tulare. The camp gate is surrounded by a large group of men shouting and waving. The Joads, escorted through the gate by state police, begin work immediately. They are paid five cents a box, not sufficient to feed the family a day's meal. After the first day of picking, Tom wanders outside the ranch. He meets up with Jim Casy, who is leading a strike against the peach orchard owners who want to pay two-and-a-half cents a box. Tom learns his family is being paid five cents because they are working as strikebreakers. As the men talk, authorities sneak up, looking for Casy, the presumed leader of the strike. Unprovoked, one of the men strikes Casy on the head, killing him. Without thinking, Tom begins beating Casy's killer. The other men intervene, and Tom's nose is broken. He escapes, hiding in the peach orchard until he can reach his house.

Marked by his scarred face and broken nose, Tom becomes a fugitive, hidden by his family. The Joads flee the peach ranch at the first daylight. They find work picking cotton and share an empty boxcar with another family, the Wainwrights. Tom hides in a nearby cave where his mother leaves him food. The family is comfortable for a time, earning enough to eat meat daily. One day, however, young Ruthie gets in a fight with another child. She threatens to call her big brother who is hiding because he has killed two men. Ma rushes to tell Tom he must leave for his own safety. Tom agrees and leaves with plans to carry on the social work that Jim Casy has begun.

Al gets engaged to sixteen-year-old Agnes Wainwright. As the cotton picking slows, the rains come. It rains steadily, and the water levels begin to rise. The night that Rose of Sharon goes into labor, the river threatens to flood the boxcar. Pa, Uncle John, Al and the rest of the men try to build an embankment to contain the river, but are unsuccessful. Rose of Sharon's baby is stillborn.

After a few days, the rain subsides. Leaving Al and the Wainwrights, the remaining Joads abandon the boxcar for higher ground. They find shelter in an old barn already occupied by a boy and his starving father. The child tells the Joads that his father has not eaten in six days and is unable to keep down solid food. Rose of Sharon offers him the breast milk no longer needed for her own child. The others leave the barn as she cradles the dying man to her breast.

About The Book

From its initial publication, the unconventional structure of The Grapes of Wrath has been both attacked and misunderstood by a great number of readers. Steinbeck's method of inserting chapters of general information or commentary between straightforward narrative chapters frustrates many readers who consider them distracting, an interruption in the "real" story of the Joad family.

These intercalary chapters, as they were termed by critic Peter Lisca, serve a distinct purpose in commenting on and expanding the events of the narrative proper. Sixteen intercalary chapters are included in the book, accounting for approximately 100 pages, or one-sixth of the text. Although the Joad characters do not appear in any of these intercalary chapters, many of the incidents found in these chapters foreshadow similar situations experienced by the Joads. Some, written in a variety of literary styles, provide a generalized, dramatic overview of the central social conditions affecting the main characters, while others provide historical information and direct commentary on book's social and political background.

Steinbeck uses recurring symbols, motifs, and specific narrative episodes to link each intercalary chapter with its adjacent narrative counterparts so that the intercalary chapters, far from being an intrusion, actually unify and strengthen the dominant themes of the novel. The land turtle of the brilliantly descriptive and symbolic Chapter 3 will be picked up by Tom Joad in Chapter 4, and the dramatic monologue of a used car salesman figures immediately before the Joads' purchase of a truck for their journey west. Likewise, the Joads' search for work in California is preceded by a history of migrant labor in that state.

Steinbeck knew the importance of his readers grasping the greater social message presented in The Grapes of Wrath. The suffering of the wandering families and their oppression by larger, more powerful forces was a social crisis of widespread magnitude. He was concerned that readers would not comprehend this urgent, yet impersonal problem unless they could focus their sympathy on the ordeals of a specific family. At the same time, however, he did not want the struggles of the Joads to be considered isolated events, specific only to a particular family. The use of intercalary chapters provides a balance, allowing Steinbeck to realize the ultimate artistic goal: To weave together specific social facts and lyrical elements to create a personal story that expresses universal truths about the human condition.

New York Times Wrote "The journey across is done in superb style, one marvellous short story after another, and all melting into this long novel of the great trek. The grandfather dies on the way, and then the grandmother. The son Noah stops at a river and decides to stay there. Without quite knowing it, he is the Thoreau in the family. A fine river, fish to catch and eat, the day and night to dream in: he wants nothing else. The little children have their fun along the road; wise little brats, they are growing up, secret and knowing. Tom and his brother take turns driving the truck, easing her over the mountains, grinding her valves, scraping the plugs: they are the mechanics. The sister, Rosasharn, christened for Rose of Sharon, expects to have her baby. Her husband disappears, aims to better himself in his own selfish way. The Joad family meet people coming and going, going to California from the Western States with hope and the orange handbills and a $75 jalopy; people coming from California embittered and broke, speaking darkly of deputies, double-crossing, 20 cents an hour and labor trouble. Those coming from California are going back to their native Oklahoma, Texas or Arkansas, to die starving in what had once been their homes, rather than die starving in a strange country."

In “The Grapes of Wrath,” Steinbeck uses the experience of migrant workers to share an important message with his readers. In presenting such an event, he shows that life is a mixture of both cruel and beautiful things. This is a unifying theme of “The Grapes of Wrath” and it is especially evident at the end of chapter twelve:

“The people in flight from terror behind-strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.”

Throughout the book, Steinbeck tries to show that good can still exist among evil. The deepest and most moving example of this is the final scene of the book, where Rosasharn breastfeeds a dying man, still willing to help another despite her own losses. In general, Steinbeck’s characters can be divided along two lines: those who just do everything they can to help themselves, and those who cooperate so as to help both themselves and others. In Steinbeck’s writings, for example, the greedy bank owners and crop growers who take advantage of the migrants are shown in a bad connotation. Steinbeck’s message though, is that people should cooperate to offset such evil. In displaying this message, Steinbeck uses chapter nineteen to share his Socialistic views with the reader:

“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”

Steinbeck openly advocates Marxist proletarian revolt in response to unjust economic conditions, which, he goes on to explain, are directly caused by capitalism:

“The tractors which throw men out of work, the belt lines which carry loads, the machines which produce, all were increased; and more and more families scampered on the highways, looking for crumbs from the great holdings, lusting after the land beside the roads. ”

To summarize our analysis of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck has, in writing this classic novel, created a moving and quite well written piece of art. The story is very descriptive, and Steinbeck’s fascinating writing techniques give the book a distinct feel. 

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