Susan Willis is a very intelligent woman that is an English Professor at the University of Duke. Even though she has a high intellect, Willis often views her surroundings through a skewed point of view. Because Willis is a communist, she tries to belittle anything positive about a democratic organization. Having such a biased opinion makes Susans remarks fairly invalid.…
The Great Depression was a hard time for Americans. The time of the depression was a time of recession in the economy. Nobody's life was easy during this time; People tried to make the best of it though. The Great Depression affected people in many different ways.…
I think that the chief reasons for the mass migration to California where based on a few different reasons. The first reason was because everyone was poor. They didn't have enough money to have the most basic necessities in life. They would even go to such lengths as to steal a neighbors house. No body was happy living in Oklahoma. They all had such hard lives that no one had time to do what they wanted to do. It was farm from sun up to sun down. That is what everyone did, and they didn't even get that much compensation for all the devotion that they put into their work day, after day, after day. If I worked at something for twelve hours a day, and just made hardly enough money to keep living, I would get quite frustrated and not be very happy at all.…
In chapter thirty of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck highlights the most destitute moment of the Joad family during their exodus to California and the transformation of many characters. Steinbeck opens the chapter by describing the flood is taking over the boxcar. Pa urges other men to build an embankment because Rose of Sharon begins to experience labor. While the men work on building the embankment, the cotton tree is uprooted, cascades into the embankment and destroys it. Steinbeck continues to show the Joads’ struggle to overcome the hardships as Pa goes back into the box car, and Mrs. Wainwright informs him that Rose Sharon has delivered a stillborn child. The Joads send Uncle John to bury the child. Because the water level keeps increasing,…
The Dust Bowl that occurred in the 1930’s along with the Great Depression was one of the lowest times in American history. The novel, The Grapes of Wrath written by John Steinbeck, takes place during this time period. The Grapes of Wrath is told from the perspective of the Joads, who are coerced to leave their home and farm in Oklahoma. The novel documents their journey traveling from Oklahoma to California. The protagonist in this novel, Tom Joad, is first introduced in Chapter 2 when he has to hitch a ride with a truck driver in order to return to his family. From the moment Tom was introduced till the last time he occurs in the novel, one should notice a significant change in his actions and behaviors. Tom Joad goes through a journey of self-change, which in the end turns him into a better person than he was before.…
Although not exactly the same, The Grapes of Wrath and To Kill A Mockingbird are similar in that the major conflicts in each deal with two people groups, one of which believes that they are superior to the other. This is shown in The Grapes of Wrath by the conflict caused by the Great Depression between the government camps and migrant workers. In To Kill a Mockingbird, it is seen because of the common belief of white supremacy over blacks.…
“Jesus Christ, one person with their mind made up can shove a lot of folks aroun'! You win, Ma.” This quote originates from Tom Joad after Ma had revolted against the family when they suggested the idea of splitting up. Ma stubbornly picked up a jack handle and waved it at the Joad family, including the normal head of the family, Pa. Ma's outbreak was astonishing to the Joads and marked the beginning of her fierce leadership of the family and the degradation of Pa's role as the head man. Throughout the tale of the Joads' migration to California, Ma had begun as a timid woman without having much say in the family decisions, but steadily took…
One of the very first quotes in the introduction of the film was “keep a man hungry and he’ll work”. This was every working man in the south; hungry, and in a position to continue to provide for their families even when the foundation of cotton and farming was stripped from under them. The many testimonies tell about this struggle, how even as the textile mill industry was on the rise and farming on its way out, farmers particularly did not want to work for a textile mill. The drastic career change was looked down upon by the entire…
This artifact is important to my topic and related to the grapes of wrath because it’s talk about the migrant workers food. Migrant workers used to eat carrot, dry onions, peanut and almond etc. They eat their food with dust on it and get sick. It was hard for them to work and survive with eating dust food.…
The dust bowl was a tragic time in America for so many families and John Steinbeck does a great job at getting up-close and personal with one family to show these tragedies. In the novel, “The Grapes of Wrath”, John Steinbeck employed a variety of rhetorical devices, such as asyndeton, personification and simile, in order to persuade his readers to enact positive change from the turmoil of the Great Depression. Throughout the novel, Steinbeck tells the fictional narrative of Tom Joad and his family, while exploring social issues and the hardships of families who had to endure the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Steinbeck’s purpose was to challenge readers to look at the harsh realities around them for “the purpose of improvement”. The rhetorical strategies used in the “Grapes of Wrath” elicit a deeper understanding from its readers for the hardships these migrants faced and helped them to fight for a better way. (John Steinbeck, "Banquet Speech," Nobel Foundation, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1962/steinbeck-speech.html, Accessed 30 August 2013.)…
Every book has a skeleton. The skeleton is the structure, it is what helps mold it into a full-fledged book, and not words thrown together. In The Grapes of Wrath, the structure is different than other books. The narrator does not only observe just the Joads, they also observe a broad number of people and sometimes the thoughts of a random, unnamed individual. This structure is referred to as interchapters, and this structure allows Steinbeck to provide background information, evoke a relation between the reader and the book, and evoke emotion in the reader.…
Through out John Steinbeck’s controversial novel, The Grapes of Wrath, the protagonist are faced with a daunting idea; that there is no ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forces in the world. Grapes of Wrath was published in an era filled with discrimination, hate, and fear directed at the fleeing “Okies”; in the early 1930’s the midwestern states where decimated by a foreseen but still devastating Dust Bowl. The reader joins the main characters, the Joad family, as they travel across the country hoping for work in a foreign state; California. Through out their trip they seem to come to believe that “there ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue” just people doing what people do. Yet the more they seem to believe this, the more the reader begins to see that there is in-fact a drastic flaw in their ideology. People do do horrible and good things, but those are what prove that Sin and Virtue do exist.…
Throughout "The Grapes of Wrath", the Joad family repeatedly crosses the paths of families in need, and the Joads help them out nearly every time. For the Joads it's almost a requirement, an obligation to help those they can. Why do people help each other? Has this changed any since the 1930's?…
The way that Ruth dealt with their grief over Hunter’s death is that she is depressed when Hunter suffered from a relapse, because Ruth’s husbands were good men, and they changed her for the better, and made her accept God to avoid anti-Semitism. However, since Andrew died due to a lung disease (p242), and Hunter also died due to a relapse (p128), Ruth cried and suffered over Hunter’s death, unable to maintain order into her house, got rid of Hunter’s stuff in her house, and left her past so behind that she forgot how to drive a car (p167). Hunter’s death resulted in Ruth having difficulty to maintain a house with her 12 children as a single parent, and it filled Ruth with negative feelings such as sadness and anger.…
Chapter seven might as well have turned The Grapes of Wrath into how to force misfortunate people to buy cars. The author’s tone turns invective during this character’s lines, and this must of been how back in the Great Depression people cursed each other. The tone also creates hate toward the car salesmen, and maybe this is where the stereotype of sales people being thieves. Tenant farmers are placed as the prey instead of the predators which is the precedent of what this books is. Steinbeck is the attorney of people whose freedom of speech right is insignificant and suppression by the public who sees them as the problem.…
