Chapter 6 Of The Grapes Of Wrath

Hannah Noel
Mrs. Walsh
English 2 Honors
22 January 2018
GOW Synthesis Chapters 5&6 One major idea that author, John Steinbeck, touches on in chapter five of his book, Grapes of Wrath, is the fact that the bank is a monster. The bank is a monster that would die without profits and the fields are dying because the farmers only planted cotton and did not rotate crops. Now that the farmers cannot harvest any cotton to sell the banks are not getting any profits. The landowners angered the monster. The banks sent tractors to these farmers’ land where they would plow through the farms and kick each landowner and their family out. They would cut through a dozen farms at a time: “The driver could not control it—straight across the country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and

The driver of the tractor is not looking at the land as he would normally look at it. He has to look at it as the bank does so that he could do his job and feed his family. In chapter six of Grapes of Wrath, this same concept comes back. When Tom Joad goes back to his house he is confused as to why no one was home and why his house and started to fall apart. Then a man, Muley Graves, comes down the path and tells Tom and Jim Casy that the bank had sent tractors to the fields by them and kicked his family out: “So they tractored all the tenants off a the lan’”(47). Steinbeck utilizes this detail to portray how the bank has moved on to Joad’s family and the area around him just so they could make money. The bank cannot afford to have tenants, so they just kick them off their land with nowhere to go and no possessions. The connection between the two chapters is that banks are forcing people out their homes with tractors. They also send people who were originally landowners because they were paying them three dollars a day. They did not send a person specifically from the bank, but someone else, so they would not have