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Examples Of Anecdotal Injustice In The Grapes Of Wrath

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Anecdotal Injustice: Steinbeck, Capote, and Foer’s Focus on Victims of Circumstance Morals have long been considered to be the basis and reasoning behind all actions and decisions people make every day. Whether it is simply to decide what to eat for lunch, or where to go next in life, all of these decisions are based on well-defined morals. But in many cases, the morals of others inadvertently ignore others that are wronged and forgotten, and rather than being able to control their own lives, these victims are forced into bad situations due to the acts of others. In John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family loses everything they have during the Dust Bowl and is forced, with very little money or possessions, to move west in an attempt …show more content…

In the text, In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, he follows the lives of two murderers before and after they kill an entire family, and the journey of their not very successful escape. Though the men were obviously bad, Capote reflects on Perry’s, one of the murderers, life that led him to kill this innocent family. He displays that because of Perry’s bad background, it was under these circumstances that led Perry to make such bad decisions and ultimately hurt harmless people. Also in Jonathon Safran Foer’s book, Eating Animals, even animals who are not often considered for their well-being are displayed in the pain and suffering that they experience every day. Through the use of rhetorical anecdotes, Steinbeck, Capote, and …show more content…

Due to the natural disaster of the Dust Bowl, the people in charge of the entire land saw the time fit to remove the tenants that lived on it and take their own chances to make a profit. In their eyes they only saw benefit and possible danger in losing their money, yet for the people who actually worked the land, this simple decision to get rid of them was a possibility to ruin their lives. In the case of the Joads and other tenants like them, it had not been their own choice to live at tenant farmers, but their whole lives had lived this way and continued to plan on living like that, but then the men came and forced them out of their homes. “Grampa took up the land, and he had to kill the Indians and drive them away. And Pa was born here… an’ we was born here. There in the door- our children born here” (Steinbeck 33). The Joads, and people all around the country just like them, had always lived on their land as tenant farmers, as had their parents and their parents’ parents. During this time, people often continued the work of their family. In the case of the Joads, it was unlucky for them to end up as farmers during a time in which farming lost much of its value. Steinbeck includes this history of the way the tenants lived in order to emphasize that it is not the fault of people like the Joads that

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