The Grapes of Wrath

Book report: “The Grapes of Wrath”
Author:John Steinbeck
Publisher:
Student:Bahronova Zamira
Class:11-26chi20
Plan:
1.Plot.
2.Characters.
3. The Jungle
4. Propaganda.

In 1962, John Steinbeck was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the committee that chose him described his novel The Grapes of Wrath as “a great work” and cited it as one of the main reasons for the honor.

A few years later, everyone in an American high school seemed to be reading the book, as I was, and most, like me, were deeply moved by the harsh and tragic lives that the Joad family and other Okies in California were forced to endure. This gut-grabbing story-telling took our breath away. The book, published in 1939, was called a Great American Novel.More than half a century later, I’ve re-read the book and found Steinbeck’s writing, in many places, powerful and even beautiful. Yet, I’ve come away from the experience disappointed, even chagrined.More than half a century later, the book seems to be a well-written piece of propaganda.
Characters
Tom Joad: the protagonist of the story; the Joad family's second son, named after his father. Later, Tom takes leadership of the family, even though he is young.
Ma Joad: the Joad family matriarch. Practical but warm-spirited, she tries to hold the family together. Her given name is never learned; it is suggested that her maiden name was Hazlett.
Pa Joad: the Joad family patriarch, also named Tom, age 50. Hardworking sharecropper and family man. Pa becomes a broken man upon losing his livelihood and means of supporting his family, forcing Ma to assume leadership.
Uncle John: Pa Joad's older brother (Tom describes him as "a fella about 60", but in narrative he is described as 50). He feels guilty about the death of his young wife years before, and is prone to binges involving alcohol and prostitutes, but is generous with his goods.
Jim Casy: a former preacher who lost his faith. He is a Christ-like figure, based on Steinbeck's friend Ed Ricketts.
Al Joad: the third youngest Joad son, a "smart-aleck sixteen-year-older" who cares mainly for cars and girls; he looks up to Tom, but begins to find his own way.
Rose of Sharon "Rosasharn" Joad Rivers: the eldest Joad daughter, a childish and dreamy teenage girl, age 18, who develops into a mature woman. Pregnant at the beginning of the novel, she eventually delivers a stillborn baby, perhaps due to malnutrition.
Connie Rivers: Rose of Sharon's husband. Nineteen years old and naïve, he is overwhelmed by marriage and impending fatherhood. He abandons his wife and the Joad family shortly after they arrive in California.
Noah Joad: the eldest Joad son, he is the first to leave the family, near Needles, California, planning to live off fishing on the Colorado River. Injured at birth and described as "strange", he may have slight learning difficulties.
Grampa Joad: Tom's grandfather, who expresses his strong desire to stay in Oklahoma. His full name is given as "William James Joad". Grampa is drugged by his family with "soothin' syrup" to force him to leave with them for California, but he dies during the first evening on the road. Casy attributes his death to a stroke, but says that Grampa is "just' staying' with the lan'. He couldn' leave it."
Granma Joad: Grampa's religious wife; she loses her will to live after his death. She dies while the family is crossing the Mojave Desert.
Ruthie Joad: the youngest Joad daughter, age 12. She is shown to be reckless and childish. While quarreling with another child, she reveals that Tom is in hiding.
Winfield Joad: the youngest Joad son, age 10. He is "kid-wild and calfish".
Jim Rawley: He manages the camp at Weedpatch and shows the Joads surprising favor.
Muley Graves: a neighbour of the Joads. He is invited to come along to California with them, but refuses. The family leave two of their dogs with him; a third they take, but it is killed by a car during their travels.
Ivy and Sairy Wilson: a migrant couple from Kansas who attend the death of Grampa and share the journey as far as the California state line.
Mr. Wainwright: a fellow laborer on the cotton farm in California; he is the husband of Mrs. Wainwright.
Mrs. Wainwright: mother to Aggie and wife to Mr. Wainwright. She helps Ma deliver Rose of Sharon's baby.
Aggie Wainwright: the sixteen-year-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Wainwright. Late in the novel, she and Al Joad announce their intent to marry.
Floyd Knowles: a man at the Hooverville, where the Joads first stay in California, who urges Tom and Casy to join labor organizations. His agitation results in Casy being jailed.
The Jungle
Yes, the poor in the 1930s and the poor today — and, in fact, the poor throughout history — have been crushed by social, political and government systems that favor the rich.
Yes, there should be more income equality. The huge wealth gap between the very rich and most of the rest of the nation’s people today is evil. Greater balance is needed.
As a journalist, I spent a career writing about all that. And The Grapes of Wrath could almost be called something like journalism, except Steinbeck doesn’t seek the balance in reporting that I and my colleagues strove for.
Indeed, his novel is very much like The Jungle, the 1906 novel about the oppression and exploitation of the poor in the Chicago Stockyards, written by Upton Sinclair, who was a journalist.
Neither novel has a hint of ambiguity. Anything bad that might have happened to one of Chicago’s poor immigrants happened to the Lithuanian-born Jurgis Rudkus and his family. Similarly, anything bad that might have happened to any Okie happened to someone in the Joad family.
Everything is very clear cut, good or evil.
And both novels overtly push socialism as the solution to the woes of the workers.
By contrast, Richard Wright’s Native Son, published in the same year as The Grapes of Wrath, also ends with a call for socialism, but it’s a much better novel.
Bigger Thomas, the central character, is no saint. He’s angry and violent, a flawed person, but one whose humanity shines through his flaws. His victimization is much more complex — and more true to the life that we live.
Making a point
This is why, while re-reading The Grapes of Wrath, I kept finding myself getting angry at Steinbeck for writing propaganda.He’s using his high skills as a writer to Make A Point.That’s fine. This book, for the first time, brought to the consciousness of Americans the difficult lives that the Okies were living. It got people talking, debating, thinking.
That’s good. But it’s not literature.
Steinbeck was seeking to manipulate his readers. They were (1) to identify with the good and saintly Joads, (2) to feel how horrible and tragic it was to be oppressed by the powerful and greedy, and (3) to do something about it.
“Push us into fightin’ ”
There was one other way he sought to shape the thinking of the average American — through fear of revolution. And also by stirring up that revolution.
Often in The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck makes the point that all of these Okies, if only they’d unite and work together, could bust the confines around them, could grab what was rightfully (under a kind of natural law) theirs and force the powerful to reckon with them. As Tom tells Ma:“Did you ever see a deputy that didn’ have a fat ass? An’ they waggle their ass an’ flop their gun around’, Ma, if it was the law they was workin’ with, why, we could take it. But it ain’t the law. They’re a-workin’ away at our spirits. They’re a-trying to make us cringe an’ crawl like a whipped bitch. They’re tryin’ to break us. Why, Jesus Christ, Ma, they comes a time when the on’y way a fella can keep his decency is by takin’ a sock at a cop. They’re workin’ on our decency.”
A few pages later, Steinbeck, in the voice of the narrator, adds this:
“The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line. And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for blacklists, for drilling. On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment.”
And, later, a minor character called Black Hat says:“They’re getting’ purty mean out there. Burned that camp an’ beat up folks. I been thinkin’. All our folks got guns. I been thinkin’ maybe we ought to git up a turkey shootin’ club an’ have meetin’s ever’ Sunday.”
And another minor character named Huston says:“I swear to God they gonna push us into fightin’ if they don’t quit a-worryin’ us.”
A fable?
Maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way. Maybe I should be thinking of The Grapes of Wrath as a 600-page fable. In a fable, there is good and bad and a moral.But can a fable be great literature? A fable is a method of passing along a bit of communal wisdom: Don’t sleep or the turtle will beat you.A fable is a method a culture uses to describe what, as a group, the culture has decided is good and what is bad. The hare lost the race, and, in our culture, going back to the Greeks, that’s a bad.But, in a culture that doesn’t prize competition as much, maybe the hare is doing good by just hanging around and enjoying himself, even to the point of dozing.
In other words, a fable is cultural propaganda.
Propaganda.
Whether I think of The Grapes of Wrath as a fable or a novel or reportage, it’s still propaganda.And, after all my years as a journalist and now my work in writing history, I hate propaganda.Propaganda is a perversion of the truth.It looks like the truth, and, in the hands of a master such as Steinbeck, it is very convincing. But it isn’t the truth.The truth is that the Okies weren’t all good or saintly, and the Californians weren’t all “ass-holes” or “fat asses.”The system did oppress the Okies, and people, rich and poor, were part of that system. Wrongs were done. No question.But the reason I love watching King Lear on the stage, the reason I love to read good journalism, the reason I write, is because I love to try to look at the complexities of human life, with all their chaos, with all their lack of clear-cut solutions, and with all their ambiguities. These are things to ponder, to wonder about, to wrestle with.There is no ambiguity in propaganda. There is no ambiguity in The Grapes of Wrath.

References
1 “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck’s USA.:1940
2.Scene from The Grapes of Wrath (1940), a film adaptation of John Steinbeck's...
3.Internet resources.