The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

This is a microcosm showing how Americans developed their nation and how they improved every aspect of their lives because they had no cream: "The families chance ond westward, and the technique of building the worlds improved so that the commonwealth could be safe in their worlds; and the form was so hardened that a family acting in the rules k newfound it was safe in the rules" (251). still this is trippingly a contradiction--the family thought it knew the rules when it built a acquire and worked it for years, and yet those rules did not make these families secure at entirely(prenominal). Indeed, the rules changed, and this odd the family as it is now--migrating from it home to the unknown, recreating itself each twenty-four hour period, trying to hold the family together in the face of a variety of forces dedicated to red it apart.

The different members of the family have characteristics which add to their problems and which also reflect large forces at the same time. grandfather Joad, for instance, is senile, and this symbolizes the vulnerability of the entire family. gramps shows considerable pride and courage when he faces down the tractor, plainly the tractor is a mechanical thing and cares no more for granddaddy Joad than the mechanizing American society cares for the Joads, their home, or their way of life. The Joads might identical to hold onto the

past in a romantic gesture not unlike Grandpa and his gun in the tractor's path, but the mechanized new world is like the tractor, moving always forward, unseeing and uncaring.

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 1939.

The new world is marked by the camps the Joads find themselves in, camps with a clear division of labor, with authoritarian regimes, with economic exploitation, and with a mechanistic system of oversight and control.

Yet there is in the human optic still a spark of the romantic and of the revolutionary design that the Joads know, and that Steinbeck knows, built this country in the first place. Tom Joad becomes the entity carrying this judge into the world, and he becomes a fugitive and so the conscience for all in his generation. Tom is from the beginning the favored child of Ma Joad, whose judgment is sound as to who is closely important and who is most dangerous. Tom is able to live day by day on the road as the family is forced to do. He becomes a labor organizer, one of the enemy as far as the landowners are concerned and a mark of the future as far as Steinbeck is concerned. Tom remakes himself in an unselfish way, dedicating himself to bettering conditions for all his people and challenging directly the sort of entrenched power they face. Ma Joad is left to carry the family forward in Tom's name.

age the migration might seem to be a recreation of the move westward, it is not really like that. There is no puss of gold at th
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