An Overview of The Grapes of Wrath exam essay topic:

"You are the author of the novel you studied in class. You have been invited to address a forum of scholars who are studying the novel as part of their Literary Studies course. Your address is to be an overview of the novel including, central issues / messages that you wanted to convey to the reader, how you used major and or minor characters to facilitate this, and any other elements of the writing craft you employed to tell your story."

For comparison and advice Tyler Overview

Sample essay in response:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

This lecture can be no substitute for reading my novel The Grapes of Wrath for the medium is itself the message. My novel aims to be persuasive and the force of its argument arises through the very experience of reading it. The structure, characters and settings embody its contemporary themes. I will however today attempt an overview to introduce you to my novel.

I am a newspaper reporter as you know and I spent a great deal of time with the Okies who came to California to prepare various newspaper reports on their lives and hopes. Naturally then in the novel I drew on my own experiences with them. I was able to incorporate their particular speech and particular vocabulary in dialogue in my novel. I am told my documentary style comes through well in my cinematic descriptions of characters and places. I tackled my task of writing the novel scientifically; for I do have an eye for great detail in the belief that the whole picture is fair when the parts are accurate.

My characters, the Joad family and with them the Wilsons and the Wainwrights, are built on the real people I met and saw. Ma, Pa, grampa, grandma, Uncle John, Noah, Al, Tom, Roseasharn and Connie, Ruthie and Winfield, and Casy are characters typical of the whole family units that packed up to move from the Dust Bowl of Okalahoma to the Fruit Bowl of California. Driven off their land by our government's 1920s' mistaken belief in an unregulated free market economy, the Okies never gained any benefits from Rooseveldt's New Deal in the 1930s. They remained simple victims of our national banks back East who were mercilessly foreclosing mortgages after the Great Depression of 1929. I wanted to tell the Okies' story and to alert America to their plight. The Hearst media empire was deaf to their plight; I needed to dramatise it by means of a novel, where readers identify with characters, and themes can be moulded and demonstrated through real life situations. This story needed to told, for these people, subsisting merely on hope and an oily rag, are Americans like us. Such dire poverty is a fact of life in this great country of ours.

I was fearful that my message would be blunted or lost if The Grapes of Wrath followed a traditional novel structure. So I interposed the action with intercalary chapters, to interpret that action like in a Greek drama and to generalise the themes I was constructing. For instance, in Chapter 3 my turtle is a central motif for Nature's struggle and will to survive. It is a totem of the Joads' will to survive. I provided a continuous present tense script in Chapter 5 to generalise the unscrupulous car salesman who preys on poor people. The typical Mae in hamburger stands along Route 66 in Chapter 15 is a counterpoint to Ma as a generalised picture of so many unfeeling, world-weary women in American society today. My Chapter 17 demonstrates my belief that self government is natural to people, when I show how the people in the roadside camps at night devised their own rules for corporate decency. I believe that people are naturally good and that the best in people will arise given the right circumstances. Treat a dog well and it will respect you; be cruel and it will retaliate. My many excursions to the seaside rock pools with Dr Ed Ricketts, my great mentor in Salinas in my youth, showed me that in Nature things will find their right level naturally. There has to be some 'oversoul' behind life, as Whitman and Emerson wrote, which aspires to the right and the good. People in groups acting naturally will also transcend their own private sufferings to achieve those common goals. So the Joads and the people encamped with them carried these unwritten rules for a decent society within them. In this way, I mingled major and minor characters in one whole as a microcosm of our American society.

I believe people are good, and the bad that they do is neither here nor there but just forced on them by cruel circumstances. So Elaine my wife's title about the grapes of wrath is a Biblical metaphor suggesting that their smouldering sense of injustice must eventually, mysteriously be rectified in a just society. I am not especially political but I do believe unlike the Christians I know that any great and merciful god would ensure his weak ones get their justice in this life in the end. Our current government policies will eventually be reversed as soon as they are shown to be unjust. I hope my novel is a catalyst towards that goal.

Casy another major character embodies someone seeking our society's salvation. If some give life for others, then the whole will benefit. Casy as I portray him is a preacher without a church but with a soul. He has a guilty conscience, not about the sex he had with girls in his congregation "frothing with the Holy Sperit" but about his abandonment of his vocation to guard their souls as holy vessels. He realises that in denying his responsibilities he brought a great evil; he prefigures bureaucrats who might repent of their cruelty and embodies any government who betrays the trust given it by their people. Casy some say is a Christ-figure with his people, leading his people and yet speechless before them. If this is how they read it, so be it.

My novel is my life's work. I has haunted me ever since. I believe the public praise and adulation I received for it especially in my Nobel Peace Prize for Literature bespeak the importance of my universal themes, not my writing skills. I hope it is memorable and I trust the universal message it espouses will inspire everyone who suffers injustice to struggle for the natural rights and dignity we all deserve as citizens, as democrats and as human beings. # 1093

"John Steinbeck" Mark P.

16th March 1999

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