Grapes Of Wrath Marxism Analysis

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“The Grapes of Wrath” is still of the classics of American literature. This work remains banned in many school libraries across the nation because some critics said it contains full of lies of American life in that period and highly pro-communist. It is because Steinbeck created the work because of showing difficulties of many Americans who had The Great Depression and The Dust Owl. Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” can be discussed by many critical theories but Marxist criticism which I will be discussing here is the one of the most common lenses through which to read the novel. This is because Steinbeck’s narrative shows the exact problems that a capitalist society describes working class people. We will read/discuss the work to see how the …show more content…

John Steinbeck works with a lot of different themes in this novel, but the issue of poverty and how capitalism contributes to it, is by far one of the most important aspects of book. The Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1939. Poverty was a lot, and like many people, farmers in the dust bowl lost their land, homes, and ways of earning money. Steinbeck 's novel depicts the experiences of just such farmers, from the loss of their land and bulldozed houses (bulldozer is type of machine), to a move across country in search of a better way of living and providing for themselves and their families. In the The Grapes of Wrath, I will follow the farming families as they move across Oklahoma to California, and observe them living in various squatter 's camps in California, always on the looking for work and ways to improve their lives because that is what people living under the rules of capitalism must do to survive in that period. Capitalism is dependent upon a free market, and privately owned businesses. In The Grapes of Wrath, we see how capitalism costs the Joads their farm when they are unable to produce crops due to the drought. They cannot pay what they owe for their land nor the renters what they owe for the house and. Steinbeck is criticizing the economic system that drove farmers to homelessness and hard poverty. He is also critical of this capitalist economic system because, in addition to destroying

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