John Steinbeck, "The Grapes of Wrath"

            As John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath” traces the ultimate desolation and poverty during the Great Depression, we are exposed to the skeletal form of human nature when in extreme despair. From this, two themes emerge: the predatory quality of survival and solidarity as a defense against ruin. As people starve and fall into deep poverty, they become easy victims of exploitation for those who have both money and power. However, the masses also pose a threat to the few; throughout the novel, there is an underlying thread of the possibility that together, the masses are greater than the powerful few.

            In the opening few scenes, there is much evidence of predatory qualities to life and to survival. As the Joads attempt to keep their home and land, the tractors run through it, destroying their home and numerous others. In one of the first expository chapters, Steinbeck introduces the concept of greater forces at play. As a tenant man pleads with the man on a tractor, the response he receives is simply, “We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man” (33). This “monster” becomes the highest factor in a predatory cycle, preying on the farmers and their land. Likewise, the tractor driver must prey on the tenant man, using the farmer’s despair to make money in order to survive. He tries to explain this to the tenant owner, saying “‘Times are changed, don’t you know? …Get your three dollars a day, feed your kids. You got no call to worry about anybody’s kids but your own’” (37). When poverty strikes, Steinbeck observes, it becomes a dog-eat-dog world, where predators will victimize others and earn money at the cost of another’s wellbeing as a means to survive.

            A second theme in “The Grapes of Wrath” is the concept of solidarity. Throughout the novel, the migrants glimpse ideas of bonding together, of becoming stronger in numbers and resistance. However, it remains merely an undertone to the novel. Ma Joad first touches upon the topic in a conversation with Tom when he arrives home, explaining, “‘Tommy, I got to thinkin’ an’ dreamin’ an’ wonderin’. They say there’s a hundred thousand of us shoved out. If we was all mad the same way, Tommy—they wouldn’t hunt nobody down—‘” (77). As they experience utter despair and poverty and become subjected to maltreatment and injustice, this thought of oneness, of solidarity, looms above. Steinbeck reinforces this speculation later in the novel during an expository chapter: “And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need” (238). While the land owners in California benefit from the rush of migrant workers—lowering their wages and receiving the hungry and starving to work at almost no cost to the employer—the potential cohesion of the migrants would be strong enough to overtake the exploiters, to disrupt the status quo. Those in power, those with land, echo this sentiment as they say, “We got to keep these here people down or they’ll take the country. They’ll take the country” (236). Steinbeck’s novel holds this concept of solidarity above the plot, above the barrenness of poverty, above the struggles of the Joads, as a distant wish, an esteemed hope, and a possible aspiration.