Tom Joad returns home on parole, after four years behind bars for killing a man. Once home, he finds that his family had been kicked out of their farm due to foreclosure. Tom catches up with them on his Uncle John’s farm, and joins them as they travel to California. On the road, the Joads meet dozen of other migrant families suffering the misery of being homeless and without a job. Once in California, however, the Joads realize that it is not what they expected. The theme of survival can be seen throughout the book, as the migrant workers attempt to find work and shelter to provide for their families. The families often worked, if they could find a job, and traveled to survive the harsh conditions of the Great Depression. The lack of jobs …show more content…
when telling us about the Joads. However, in alternating chapters, the narrator shifts from from the Joads and instead gives us descriptions of the Great Depression Era. At times, the narrator will address the reader as “you.” For example, he says, “For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I” and cuts you off forever from the we” ( ) By exposing the reader to a variety of perspectives, Steinbeck allows the reader to get a sense of what life was like for migrant workers in the late 1930s. It's almost as though Steinbeck has created a textbook about migrant workers in California during the Great Depression, and he wants to represent as many stories as possible so that we can learn as much as …show more content…
Depression is causing families to leave their homes in search of a new life. "California. This here's California and we're right in it!" (Steinbeck 202). Tom and his family do make it to California okay and are all still together, with the exception of the tragic loss of Grandma and Grandpa.The Joads face many tough times along they way, but it is when they have a chance to settle down for a while and plan out what they will need to do next, that keeps them alive. Although it may not be easy, it is still a chance and they are going to take whatever they can get in order to keep living and strive for something
By doing this, the author reveals that the migrants are all facing similar situations and responding in largely the same way—generosity. Thus revealing that the Joad’s experience is commonplace and applies to most of the migrants, proving its universality. Later on, the author once again mentioned the migrant families camping together and wrote “in the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home was one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream” (193). This quote conveys the mindset of the migrants and reveals that they are facing the same problems and struggles. The author uses juxtaposition between the intercalary chapters and the Joad’s story to reveal the universality of their struggle. In doing so he provides a comparison between the general people and a specific family, revealing the shared experiences between the two groups. The Joads have also begun to take on a community based mindset at this point in the novel, as shown by their generosity to the Wilsons, their outrage at the unjust Californians, and their rejection of the family-first point of view. The similarities between the general people's experiences and the Joad's reveals the common migrant experience.
Literature Essay Could prison be a better place to live than the beautiful scenery of the Western Frontier? It sounds preposterous, but Tom Joad was a regular southerner from Alabama who was released from prison when he had made the decision to travel across the country to California with his family. His family was heading from Alabama to California due to the impending loss of property from the Dust Bowl. It sounds a lot better than staying in prison, but Tom Joad actually made a poor decision. Ironically, Tom Joad’s life would have been more luxurious in prison.
The Grapes of Wrath Essay During the Great Depression, many families were unable to find work and food to survive. There was an abundance of workers and a lack of jobs available for them. In The Grapes of Wrath, the Joads were among the group of families who struggled for survival. Although they tried to control their fate, ultimately, the Joads and the many other families in similar situations were at the mercy of the bank and the generosity or selfishness of the people around them. Steinbeck is implying that individuals are not in control of their own destiny, rather we are products of our environment and the people we interact with.
The Joad family’s dogged tenacity reflects Steinbeck’s own unwillingness to give up, and acts as a plea for the reader to be similarly determined. The author introduces various roadblocks that the travelers have to overcome with an enduring passion. As he describes, sometimes in gruesome detail, the issues that they face, his own emotions are evident. Steinbeck himself viewed some of the environments in which the Joads live, and his distress at the inhumane conditions is expressed
The Joads started their journey west with the loss family members due to death and abandonment and with high expectations for the promises they expected from the move. They had made makeshift families and communities. Following the year that the stock market crashed in year 1929, farms in the Midwest dealt with severe drought. Farmers and their families were forced to leave their homes and head west to California. The Joads tried desperately to keep their morals and family together.
As a major literary figure since the 1930s, Steinbeck displays in his writing a characteristic respect for the poor and oppressed. In many of his novels, his characters show signs of a quiet dignity and courage for which Steinbeck has a great admiration. For instance, in The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck describes the unrelenting struggle of the people who depend on the soil for their livelihood. One element helping give this novel an added touch of harmony is Steinbeck’s ability to bind these two ideas into one story: the never ending struggle to survive and primacy of the family.
An author named John Steinback wrote many books in the 1930’s about migrant workers and the struggles they had to face. One of these books he has written is about two men named George and Lennie, it takes us along with them on their journey as migrant workers in the book, Of Mice and Men. During the Great Depression many people had moved to California to try and better their lives although it did not work for many as they were paid very little for their work which had mostly only paid for basic necessities. There were still opportunities for people to improve parts of their lives. In the book, Of Mice and Men, John Steinback shows how my thesis is true through the characters in the story.
The book “Fresh Fruits, broken bodies, Migrant Farmers in the United States By Seth Holms, is about Triqui migrants, who migrated up and down the west coast of the United States and Mexico, traveling between rural hometowns in Oaxaca and ideas of industrialized agricultural production in California and Washington. From reading this, he came to an understanding that the ethnography of how they made a living, the sorts of problems and harassment they faced, and the dreadful realities of a food system made on the backs of poor migrant workers. He experienced how the poor suffered taking a hint from his informers, who warned Holmes that crossing the border is a particular kind of suffering, that he needed to hold in order to understand their lives.
Steinbeck creates a family that represents the struggling people during this time. The harrowing journey of the Joads is very similar to those who were forced to travel for survival. In this heart-wrenching novel, the Joads
A migrant worker's life In John Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice and Men, George and Lennie are migrant workers in California during the Great Depression. In a similar fashion with Steinbeck’s other successful story such as The Grapes of Wrath, tell the intricate story of life during the Great Depression. The struggles they faced to overcome the injustice of society, and the economic crisis. Steinbeck’s purpose in writing the novella is to show the struggle and loneliness migrant workers faced during the Great Depression through George, Lennie, and Candy.
Set in the swallowing depression of the 1920’s, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck provides a hallowing, realistic view into the plight of the proletariat farmer and the exploitation that was all too common during the Great Depression by major corporations. Steinbeck’s literary work serves as a window into the world of the great depression by not only providing a narrative history of the era, but also giving faces to the nameless victims through the characters of Tom Joad, the lead protagonist of the story and Ma, the archetypal matriarch of the house in this 1930’s piece of literature. Steinbeck also uses key stylistic tools to further enlighten and inform the reader to the plight of the farmers and poor folk of the 1930’s. The
While Steinbeck’s main characters are migrant farmers, he still describes how the Great Depression affected folk of other occupations, such as the truck driver and Mae, the waitress. Not everyone moved west when the recession hit; those in urban areas tried to keep their jobs and make ends meet. Many could not pay rent and made little shacks of out cardboard to live in. Groups of these shacks were called “Hoovervilles,” similar to the “Okievilles” in California (Nishi, 1998, pp. 8-9). On the other side of the spectrum, there were some wealthy during all of this. Although still affected by the times, these few managed to keep a higher standard of living than was possible for most. Steinbeck shows that no one was immune to the plague of hardship brought on by the Great Depression.
John Steinbeck's detached point of view in The Harvest Gypsies helps give readers a deeper and more emotional understanding of the plight that migrant farmers went through in the 1930s because of the Great Depression. Steinbeck achieved a detached point of view with this novel by using a straightforward expository writing style. Because he used this type of writing style, Steinbeck bluntly gave the reader insight on what a migrant farmer family was going through exactly as it happened. Steinbeck describes the family as living in a tent “full of flies” that “[buzz] about the foul clothes of the children… [whom have] not been bathed nor cleaned for several days” (Steinbeck 3). Because Steinbeck told of what happened to the boy and his family
Steinbeck, in the novel, The Grapes of Wrath, portrays that the hardships and struggles the migrants go through are challenges that ultimately bring out the positive aspects of the human spirit. Steinbeck supports his assertion by depicting Mae’s change of heart in the fifteenth chapter, the Hoovervilles, and the death of Rosasharn’s baby. The author’s purpose is to expound on the hardships that these poor migrant farmers faced in order to express the persistence of the human spirit. The author writes in a depressed tone to help readers grasp his underlying message.
“STOP KICKING ME DAMN!” I’d been pestering my little sister as my mother and us drove in the daunting summer night from Las Vegas, Nevada to Lodi, California. The ride had been exhausting, frustrating, and did I mention all my family's belongings had been robbed by the greedy monstrosity known as the bank? Okay so I did take the trip but my family hadn't been robbed for all our assets although this did occur to The Joads, the fictional family crafted by John Steinbeck in his Nobel Prize winning book “The Grapes Of Wrath”. In this astonishing piece of work, Steinbeck portrays family as a fortifying entity that regardless of its endeavours will never yield to the suffocating inconveniences of reality. This book generously provides readers with a large versatile selection of characters that demonstrate the good, bad, ugly, and alluring values all families have or relate to. Much alike my families little trip, the Joads take a vast adventure discovering that family is such a dominant force, and through its dominance, it has several weakness preventing it from being able to conquer all.