The tone of chapter 11 in John Steinbeck's, “The Grapes of Wrath,” is sympathetic, sad and hopeless. His word choice and syntax show how the sad houses were left to decay in the weather. His use of descriptive words paints a picture in the reader's mind. As each paragraph unfolds, new details come to life and adds to the imagery. While it may seem unimportant, this intercalary chapter shows how the effects of the great depression affected common households. His use of imagery shows the reader the aftermath of the great depression was not complete destruction, but slow rusting and weathering. For example, in the second paragraph of chapter 11, Steinbeck uses this to describe the situations the vacant homes would encounter, “The doors of the
John Steinbeck’s classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath, explains the story of the Joad family while simultaneously dealing with eternal human issues. We open on Tom Joad, fresh out of prison, hitchhiking his way back home after killing a man with a shovel. From there we travel through ideas of religion, capitalism, xenophobia, and determination. As Tom begins walking home from where he was dropped off, he runs across his childhood preacher, alone and barefoot, and discusses ideas of human desire and sin within the church after learning that Casy is no longer a member. Continuing on his way home, Tom finds his family’s barn abandoned and his neighbors gone.
Throughout Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath several of the chapters are spaced by intercalary chapters. Which are chapters that contain general information on comments based off of the previous chapters presented. Intercalary chapters can be seen as a distraction or a “waste of space” to some readers. But, others believe that it is a great way to clarify what has happened in the preceding chapter. I for one believe that the use of intercalary chapters have assisted in aiding me with a better understanding of the overall meaning of Grapes of Wrath.
In Chapter, 5, an intercalary chapter, the tenant farmers suffers from the payments that were unable to be paid mainly due to the decreased crop production. The quote describes the owner’s situation where they were also struggling to pay for the debt they made. Steinbeck uses personification (metaphor) such as the ‘bank monster’ avoiding eating side-meat and ‘breathing’ to describe the bank’s desperate situation where their business would not be able to survive without the reliance on the landowners. Like the monsters, who break the peace and show their wickedness from their unconsciousness, the bank became a source of suffering and pain of the tenant farmers and transformed into ‘money-demanding machine’ when they got into a desperate situation.
Grapes of Wrath Synthesis Essay Coretta Scott King, prominent civil rights activist and wife of Martin Luther King Jr., once stated, “The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members”. King argues that the real value of a community lies in how people are treated within the group rather than the communities effect on the outer world. During the Great Depression, the common experience of poverty throughout the nation brought people together to form communities that assisted each other in their aim of survival. The struggle prevalent across the working class created a culture and community that was reliant on this compassion for each other.
How did Steinbeck use his unique writing in The Grapes of Wrath to provide a brutally frank and realistic memoir of migrants in America during the Great Depression? Introduction: In 1939 John Steinbeck forever made an impact on the way The Great Depression is widely thought of by publishing The Grapes of Wrath. Within the book Steinbeck gives two perspectives on the Great Depression, one deeply personal about a family, the Joads and how they are affected, and at the same time that of the people they interacted with, the larger historical perspective, an economic perspective. The novel is largely a commentary on the American system, and takes a complicated look at capitalism.
John Steinbeck’s novels The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men enable readers to capture a glimpse of the time of the Great Depression in the United States. In The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family of Oklahoma, accompanied by thousands of other farming families, travels across America to chase a dream that lies in California. Their dream is to attain jobs and prosper off of their own land once again. However, they find only disappointments in California, with all of the work already taken and the poverty just as severe as it was in Oklahoma. In Of Mice and Men, the two main characters, George and Lennie, build a powerful friendship as they migrate to California for work.
As society has become an integral part of the world’s culture, the opinions and misconceptions of others have dominated the way people live. Throughout history, certain groups and ideas have been suppressed by the ones in charge. These actions have sprouted an almost universal indifference to those deemed less than ideal, and therefore created a divide in the way society sees race, age groups and even gender. Coupled with the Great Depression, these beliefs are the driving force for the majority of problems individuals experience in the text. In the novel Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck uses the device of conflict to portray the external struggles of characters living in the era of the Great Depression.
Intercalary Chapter Literary Analysis During the Great Depression, the nation as a whole was stripped of financial security and forced into a survivalist way of living. This changed the ways that people interacted with one another and the overall mentality of society. In the Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family is torn from their land and find themselves with nothing, a common story for migrant farmers of that time, derogatorily called “Okies” by Californians. But this is not the only group that is struggling, the entire county was in a state of panic and bruteness, no matter how “well off” they seemed to be.
A Sacrificial Breastfeeder: John Steinbeck’s New Historicism perspective in the 20th Century John Steinbeck’s most interesting ending is illustrated in the 1939 classic Grapes of Wrath. “She moved slowly into the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her chest” (Steinbeck 455).
In this essay, I am going to look at what ways the Great Depression affected the American people with examples from John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men. Available jobs and high wages had been
John Steinbeck, in the novel, Grapes of Wrath, identifies the hardships and struggle to portray the positive aspects of the human spirit amongst the struggle of the migrant farmers and the devastation of the Dust Bowl. Steinbeck supports his defense by providing the reader with imagery, symbolism and intense biblical allusions. The author’s purpose is to illustrate the migrant farmers in order to fully exploit their positive aspects in the midst of hardships. Steinbeck writes in a passionate tone for an audience that requires further understanding of the situation.
John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is a classic American novel that shows the difficulties migrant workers had to go through during the Great Depression. The novel’s intercalary chapters use setting, syntax and other literary elements to depict the hardships that migrant families went through and to create a tone of despair in the story. Body Paragraph 1: By using both syntax and diction, Steinbeck develops a tone of despair in the Intercalary Chapter 25 of the grapes of wrath.
Since the book came out in 1939, everyone has had a opinion on the ending to John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. It has a very controversial ending, that Steinbeck thought would name the last nail into the coffin, so to speak, on how bad the dust bowl and moving west really was. The ending starts when the Joad family is threatened with a flood, so they make their way to a old barn where they find a boy and his old father. The boy says his father is starving, and that he can’t keep anything solid down. He needs something like soup or milk.
The “bright dust - laden bar” symbolizes that the hope the farmers have is still ambiguous and dissatisfactory to their increasing anguishes. “ Like rushing stars” represent that the hope or dreams that they have are brief and do not last very long because they are hit with the austere realities of the Great Depression before they can get carried away with their imaginations. “ Like rushing stars” also symbolizes the innocence in a child and how every man possess that innocence in himself. The innocence is connoted through the childish language which Steinbeck uses in this
In The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, the chapters alternate between two perspectives of a story. One chapter focuses on the tenants as a whole, while the other chapter focuses specifically of a family of tenants, the Joads, and their journey to California. Chapter 5 is the former and Steinbeck does an excellent job of omniscient third person point of view to describe the situation. Chapter 5’s main idea is to set the conflict and let the readers make connections between Steinbeck’s alternating chapters with foreshadowing. Steinbeck is effectual in letting readers make connections both to the world and the text itself with the use of exposition, and symbolism.