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The Grapes Of Wrath is a book full of troubles and tragedy that a family from Oklahoma face on their journey to California to find work to support themselves. Forced to leave their home and the place they grew up the Joads encounter corrupt people who exploit them, horrible living conditions, death, unsuitable weather conditions and situations that truly tests them. This book shows just how much a family can maintain their dignity by defying corruption, authority, and Mother Nature herself.
“The highway became their home and movement their medium of expression” ( Steinbeck, 163). While on the road grandpa Joad becomes ill. Because of this the Joads stop on a campsite and they meet the Wilsons who offer their tent for grandpa to rest. He however suffers a stroke and dies. Funerals are very expensive because of this the Joads bury him illegally. Not long after grandpa dies grandma gets ill as well . Grandma does end up dying and this completely devastated ma and the rest of the family. Ma feels bad because they can not give Grandma the funeral she had always wanted. They instead bring her to a funeral home.
As the Joads and other families embark on their journey to California they are faced with different people who try to exploit them. They meet crooked car salesmen who try to sell them horrible cars for an unreasonable price for the current condition of the car. However because they had no knowledge of car selection they paid those unreasonable prices in order to get a car that takes them to California. They would replace new batteries with broken batteries after the car was sold so in order for themselves to make even more money of of the people who bought the cars. They would take the husbands away so that thei...
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...e dust and carried it away. The wind grew stronger” (Steinbeck, 2). At the end of the book there is a big flood that overfloods everything. Both of these weather conditions leave the Joads and other families similar to them with problems.
The Joads truly experience hard time that test their character, their dignity and their strength. From people, companies and various other situations that exploit them, figure head that abuse their authority and mother nature. They are tested in various ways that in the end leaves them stronger. This book shows just how much a strong family who sticks together can endure and still manage to stay together and increase the strength and their dignity. The Joads completely defy corruption, authority, and Mother Nature herself.
Work Cited
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin Books, 2008.
Most of Steinbeck’s work conveys a deeper meaning or message to the readers, and The Grapes of Wrath presents no exception, as redemption’s prevalence influences the growth of each character. Although the book ends with a tragic flood after the family has faced the loss of Rose of Sharon’s newborn baby, the novel still ends in happiness, since characters such as Jim Casy, Uncle John, Tom Joad, and Rose of Sharon attain redemption and in doing so, become saviors for migrant families. Steinbeck manifests the idea the migration did not necessarily implicate the Joads would find prosperity in the promised land of California, but would instead fulfill the quest for absolution, which results in their heroic
Steinbeck's intercalary chapters in The Grapes of Wrath have nothing to do with the Joads or other characters of the novel, but help describe the story in different terms. They are similar to poems, offering different viewpoints of the migration, and clarifying parts of the story that the reader might not understand. An excellent example of this use can be seen in chapter 21, where an examination of the attitudes of migrant Okies and the residents of California reveals the changing nature of land ownership among the changing population of California and gives greater meaning to the fierce hostility that the Joads meet in California.
The Joad family members were facing hardships from the beginning. Before the journey, Tom Joad had been in prison and that was a downer to everyone. In the scenes of overcoming this problem, Tom was released and his family was so excited and full of joy to see him. Before they could celebrate too much, they found themselves having to leave the land that most of them were born on, raised on and labored for. They decided that as shady as it was to be forced off their own land, the drought had shattered any hopes of prospering from it anyway. With the hope of a better life out in California and a flyer that said pickers needed, they set out for the proclaimed promised land.
The first and most obvious conflict the Joad family faces in the beginning of the novel is the ongoing struggle with nature. Beginning the novel is a description of the "Dust Bowl" and the families trying to work the land and make a living. The Joad family's home and land is taken away because they cannot grow any crop during the drought and are forced from their home by the bank. This is when they decide to move west to California and find work and a better life there.
Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is a realistic novel that mimics life and offers social commentary too. It offers many windows on real life in midwest America in the 1930s. But it also offers a powerful social commentary, directly in the intercalary chapters and indirectly in the places and people it portrays. Typical of very many, the Joads are driven off the land by far away banks and set out on a journey to California to find a better life. However the journey breaks up the family, their dreams are not realized and their fortunes disappear. What promised to be the land of milk and honey turns to sour grapes. The hopes and dreams of a generation turned to wrath. Steinbeck opens up this catastrophe for public scrutiny.
Then being to poor to afford a funeral they had to just bury grandma in a random spot.
The book's entire plot centers around a forced exodus. Regardless of one’s views on Naturalism, it is nearly indisputable that the Joads’ impetus for exodus was economic forces beyond the Joads' control. The family is repeatedly oppressed by the powers that be: the faceless bank, the clerks at the roadside, the owners and operators of the farms, and the police. A sense of impersonality and inhumanity dominate the description of the banks, and as such the entire economic system that perpetuates it. When the dispossessed and downtrodden farmer as...
John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath in response to the Great Depression. Steinbeck's intentions were to publicize the movements of a fictional family affected by the Dust Bowl that was forced to move from their homestead. Also a purpose of Steinbeck's was to criticize the hard realities of a dichotomized American society.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck is considered a classic novel by many in the literary field. The trials and tribulations of the Joad family and other migrants is told throughout this novel. In order to gain a perspective into the lives of "Oakies", Steinbeck uses themes and language of the troubling times of the Great Depression. Some of these aspects are critiqued because of their vulgarity and adult nature. In some places, The Grapes of Wrath has been edited or banned. These challenges undermine Steinbeck's attempts to add reality to the novel and are unjustified.
Incomprehensibly, The Grapes of Wrath is both a praiseworthy radical investigation of the abuse of horticultural workers and the climaxes in the thirties of a verifiably racist focusing on whites as victimized people. The novel barely specifies the Mexican and Filipino migrant workers who commanded the California fields and plantations into the late thirties, rather intimating that Anglo-Saxo...
Because of the devastating disaster of the dust bowl, the Joad family was forced to leave their long-time home and find work and a new life elsewhere. They, like many other families, moved to California. "The land of milk and honey". The people in the dust bowl imagined California as a haven of jobs where they would have a nice little white house and as much fruit as they could eat. This dream was far from the reality the migrant farmers faced once in California. The dreams, hopes, and expectations the Joads had of California were crushed by the reality of the actual situation in this land of hate and prejudice.
In the beginning of the novel, Steinbeck describes the devastating Dust bowl that settles “on the corn, on roofs,” and blankets “the weeds and trees” (Steinbeck 3). His use of imagery instantly installs the picture of destruction into the reader’s mind. The Dust Bowl is the beginning of the hardships that are to come for the migrants. There is an anecdote of a turtle who struggles to get to the other side of the road. The turtle struggles up the embankment like the families struggled to get to California. When he was trying to cross the highway he was nearly hit twice, which is similar to the business owners and Californians running over the Oklahoma people. This small chapter symbolizes the entire journey of the Joad family, in turn it symbolizes the journey of all the Oklahoma people. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side.
The Grapes of Wrath is a novel by John Steinbeck that exposes the desperate conditions under which the migratory farm families of America during the 1930's live under. The novel tells of one families migration west to California through the great economic depression of the 1930's. The Joad family had to abandon their home and their livelihoods. They had to uproot and set adrift because tractors were rapidly industrializing their farms. The bank took possession of their land because the owners could not pay off their loan. The novel shows how the Joad family deals with moving to California. How they survive the cruelty of the land owners that take advantage of them, their poverty and willingness to work.
While the plight of the Joad family serves as a representation of the resilience of humanity, Steinbeck specifically interjects most of the philosophical musings found in the novel through various inner chapters, where an unknown narrator poses thought provoking, yet more general musings about the current issues facing American farmers like the Joad family. Specifically, in Chapter 14, Steinbeck utilizes repetitive diction, movement imagery, an extended war metaphor to depict the unknown-narrators inner musings about the rising movement for migrant workers rights in order to convey the larger theme of the perseverance of man throughout the
Transience is another important theme that is clearly introduced in the novel. The Joads family, like many other migrant families, is forced to lose their home. They had to live in a government camp because there is nowhere else to go. They had to change everything in order to adapt with the new circumstances. For example, Ma Joad, in chapter 8, comments on these changes saying: “I never had my house pushed over…I never had my fambly stuck out on the road. I never had to sell ــever’thing ـــHere they come now” (The Grapes of Wrath 65), these families do not even have the right of humanitarian living