Anger In John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath

When someone betrays us, our first response as humans is anger. But anger only gives you a split second of power and fuels bad decisions. It forces you into a corner and makes you easily angry. Instead of turning to anger, we can learn to understand other’s perspective before taking actions we will regret later on.
Anger promotes the need to fill emptiness to conceal feelings. Zits finally returns to his own body with two guns in his jacket pocket, deciding whether to shoot or not. He looks at a little boy standing next to his mother and thinks :“I hate him for being loved so well. I want to be him.” Zits misses motherly love and is always searching to fill the emptiness in his heart. To a certain degree, Zits acts out because of the memory of his father, a drunk. He feels that if he behaves likes his father, it will bring him closer to him. Zits plans to shoot everyone in the bank because he believes that it will bring his mother back. He wants the boy’s perfect life with no suffering. But after all the transformations, he realizes that there is no such thing as completeness and no

suffering. Notably, Zits he sees Jimmy as a man who is loved by everyone, yet in the end, he loses everyone that he loves. Everyone suffers in a different way and are “ all in this together.” In the end, there is no point in acting with anger because everyone is the same. They all live imperfect lives just like Zits.
Further, anger only gives you illusions of strength.

Zits is always angry because he feels betrayed by his family and blames them for all the pain they have caused. Once he meets Justice, he learns how to feel powerful and take revenge. Justice gives Zits two fake guns to practice shooting at random strangers without any hesitation. Gradually, Zits is able to shoot people without regret because his anger blinds him from seeing the damage he is causing. Anger prohibits us from realizing that someone has more than one characteristic than our first impressions of them. There is only instantaneous jolt of power. That feeling tells you that someone has wronged you and you have the authority to do whatever you want until there is reconciliation. Anger is a result of fear and lack of self confidence when dealing with betrayal. However, that anger doesn’t signify strength, only

blindness.
In like manner, forgiving and understanding someone doesn’t mean forgetting, but helps to cope with betrayal. Zits gets the opportunity to transform into his father’s body and understand why he left Zits, blaming his father for all the grief and emptiness in his life. His father doesn’t want to think back to that painful moment or feel the regret of leaving his own son. Through his memories, Zits sees the reminiscence of the hospital in which he was born in. In that instant, he feels pain in his father’s chest. Zits’ father remembers being eight years old, ready to go to sleep after going shooting earlier that day. His father (Zit’s grandfather) found out that he didn’t shoot anything and was told that he was worth nothing. He (Zit’s father) repeated it over and over again and believed it. Zits understood that his “father, [was] whipped and bloodied by this memory.” He knows that his father ran away not because he didn’t love him, but because he loved him too much and was scared to ruin Zits’ life like his own father did. Until that moment, Zits was convinced his father didn’t want him or love him and was angry at him. Once he stopped chasing for an answer to his betrayal, he was able to let go of anger.
The key antidote to betrayal is overcoming fear and understanding the other’s perspective of the situation. Once you know both sides of the story, patience and forgiveness will conquer anger.