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(1)"The journey in The Grapes of Wrath can be read at several levels: as a journey by the Joads, as any forced migration of workers or as a journey by humanity." How is the theme of a journey a suitable vehicle for dramatising Steinbeck's messages? Argue a view in response.
Conventionally, realistic novels mimic life and offer social commentary too. Just as in life, characters in them usually grow and develop as they respond to shifting circumstances within a network of relationships. Such novels dramatise life and growth.
In this respect, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is no different. 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 realised and their fortunes disappear. What promised to be the land of milk and honey turns to sour grapes. In the same way. the hopes and dreams of a generation turned to wrath. Steinbeck opens up this catastrophe for public scrutiny.
The novel is starkly realistic. With the Joads as they travel, we meet the dark underside of capitalism with its uncontrolled poverty, its inhuman greed and human cost, and sense a fractured trust between government and people. The underside contains wounded characters: the despairing Muley Graves, the strange Noah and the obsessed Uncle John, a one-eyed man self-pitying his state, the typical Mae serving in a Highway 66 cafe and the hell-bent vigilantes and deputies. This realism reaches a strange, even melodramatic nadir in the scene that closes the novel.
But such social realism crafts a point, not to allow a voyeuristic peek at the poor but to illustrate the depth of poverty and exploitation contemporary Americans are suffering. However, this realism is tempered but not compromised by the goodness of ordinary people: the Joads meet up with the Wilsons, they are welcomed by the people at the Weedpatch camp and Casy saves Tom. The realism is still relevant to readers today.
To structure the novel as a journey has many advantages. Not only do characters develop but the settings change too; we see and hear much more in different settings and so can gain a more comprehensive view of the impact of these satanic economic forces. The reader moves from place to place and scene to scene observing their nationwide effects. As she moves from intercalary chapter to its subsequent application in the Joads' lives and vice versa, a reader can readily transfer meanings from the general to the particular. Readers are able to build up a general picture of the fraying nation out of the jigsaw pieces that are the Joads' journey.
The journey structure also serves point of view: what the Joads experience, we experience. They meet good and bad, rumours and certainties, and desert and lush valleys. The journey gives the reader various vignettes as sub-plots to complement the main one. The theme of puzzlement and despair is borne in dialogue; when the fat man near Paden (135) says: "Well I don't know what the country's comin' to", he echoes others saying the same.
Journeys also offer readings at deeper levels. In reading, not only do we journey with the Joads, we move with all migrants and even hobble with humanity. Steinbeck demonstrates that the path to justice and peace is stony and never sure; that life is fraught with trials and tribulations but in the end the wrath of a dislocated people will win God's justice at the vintage of final judgement.
This novel dramatises that wrath of the dispossessed. With strong Biblical overtones, Steinbeck's rather strident and earnest tone projects his rather incoherent social philosophy. However, the novel is not a prescription for political action but rather a loaded description exhorting us to greater social commitment, wider compassion and to formulate policies for justice.
With its stark realism and endearing characters,The Grapes of Wrath dramatises all human life and and the march to justice. Whether America has heeded Steinbeck yet is a moot point. Perhaps a popular Democratic President in the 1990s can do more for them than a novelist in the forties. Clearly, a nation on a journey must listen to its sages who speak for its own people. (689 words)
The journey theme of The Grapes of Wrath
by Matt S. (edited)
The Grapes of Wrath is a novel that can be read on many levels. The concept of a journey is evident at every level of interpretation, from its most simple, the journey of the poor Joads travelling from Oklahoma to California, to a complex one where it is a spiritual journey ......... In painting a literary portrait of the plight of itinerant farm workers called Okies, Steinbeck describes to America what he perceives as an unjust society. ........
Steinbeck uses the idea of the journey as one of the many themes of this novel, whether it be a spiritual, mental or physical journey. Consciousness comes in stages so the structure brings stages of awareness. .......
At a deeper level of reading, Casy exemplifies a journey of the spirit. He is a former preacher, ........ Perhaps it is more than a coincidence that his initials are also JC.
By the end of their physical journey, the Joads have almost lost their family identity. However they have replaced it with something equally worthwhile: they have found kinship with other migrant families........
Journey demonstrates themes. When isolated families fuse with one another, a larger family, a family of Man develops. Numerous characters and events in The Grapes of Wrath help.......
Thus the journey structure serves Steinbeck very well. It enables him to show the Joads' progress as a family into the wider family of migrants, suggesting humanity's direction for the better......
The journey theme in The Grapes of Wrath
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, he describes the unremitting struggle of the people who depend on the soil for their livelihood. This novel was probably his greatest success because he was able to bind these two ideas into one story: the never ending struggle to survive and caring for those dear to them.
The journey of the Joads served as a suitable vehicle for the delivery of Steinbeck's message on three levels. The first is literal: he used the journey and its ever-changing environment to put the Joads through many situations. The second level is general: the journey of the Joads can be seen as the same that forced farmers to become migrants from the dust bowl westward or indeed of any mass migration since the beginning of time. The third level is the symbolic level, which I call the Fractal Idea of Sameness, that many things are identical at different levels.
The first level, the literal, is simply to describe the events the Joads witness and experience. Steinbeck uses the journey to place his characters in a range of dilemmas. He is then able to draw reactions from them. As each character involved in the situation reacts, we are able to see Steinbeck's respect for the poor shining through. The 'never say die' efforts of Uncle John to stop the rising flood water is one example of Steinbeck's unremitting struggle theme. The constant effort of the entire Joad family to find work, even though they are poor, oppressed and hungry, show us that Steinbeck wants to show their tremendous courage and dignity. In this way, Steinbeck is able to use the journey structure to describe these fine qualities he sees and respects in the poor.
If we read a little deeper in The Grapes of Wrath, we find the journey of the Joads mirrors that of other Okies and other forced migrations in history. The journey of the Joads has its ups and downs. Migrants are not always received with open arms; they are persecuted and looked upon as not even human. For them the promised land becomes the land of despair. In many ways, the journey of the black Africans to America as slaves is similar to the dust bowl migrations. Both are forced from the land that they love by almost non-human forces. They were taken to the land of riches where they were poor. The slaves were however taken by force but the Okies were seduced by the lure of work and prosperity.
To help understand the third and deepest level of reading, we can apply a mathematical idea, that is the Fractal Idea of Sameness, that things are identical at different levels. For example, if we look at a mountain we see it has the same shape as a smaller peak, which has the same shape as a small mound, all the way down to a heap of dirt. If we apply this principle to this novel, we see that the journey of Tom is identical to that of the Joads which is the same as that of all humanity which is the same as that of the turtle of Chapter 3. Each of these journeys has its ups and downs, setbacks and positives. Each starts doing something and ends up doing something else. But all are moving forward. This is I think is what Steinbeck intends us read: that humanity is on a journey, and for better or for worse we continue to move forward. This is why the journey structure is so suitable as it is itself a theme. The journey of the Joads is the same as the haphazard progress of the human race towards a goal, perhaps it is justice at last. Like the turtle also constantly moving, it never knowing the outcome till it gets there. Still it plods on.
All in all, Steinbeck's choice of the journey structure to dramatise his several themes has enabled him to relate life's realities. He is able to show us the virtue of the poor by trapping his characters in an unfair world of persecution and downfalls, yet they remain sympathetic and heroic if defeated. Through the journey, he is able to show readers that life has its ups and downs. This structure makes for ease of access to his message. By reaching the general theme of humanity's journey, his novel attains the status of a classic, for humanity will always be on a journey. This makes The Grapes of Wrath not only a classic but a timeless one as well.
Patrick (edited)
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