John Steinbeck, "The Grapes of Wrath"

            John Steinbeck employs a unique stylistic device in structuring the text of “The Grapes of Wrath” in such a way that draws an overt political agenda into a sentimentalist view of the great depression. As the plot follows the trials of the Joad family in their migration to California, Steinbeck inserts brief expository chapters detailing description of the landscape, the people, and the animals to create a parallel from the lives of the Joads to the great exodus occurring for a group of people and the ultimate destruction of the land. These description sections follow two trajectories: the first, a lyrical narrative of the land and the animals, metaphorical for the migrant workers, in an endeavor to evoke emotion and understanding; the second, a polemic view of the culture shift and the capitalist forces disrupting an agrarian utopia. 

            In one of the first few scenes, Steinbeck gives a detailed account of the travels of a land turtle, allegorically parallel to the struggles of the Joads and the other farmers in a mass exodus across the nation. The poetic, lyrical voice is in service of fostering sympathy, first for the turtle, and then—by extension—for the farmers swept off their land. Over the grass and dirt, “a land turtle crawled, turning aside for nothing, dragging his high-domed shell over the grass” (14). Throughout the passage with the turtle, Steinbeck focuses on its persistence and perseverance, for he “stared straight ahead” and kept “his head held high” (14) as various obstacles appeared in his path: “clover burrs fell on him” (14) and an embankment proved a steep climb. Just as the migrant workers persist despite hardship—their experience, too, is endured while they “strain and slip” (15)—the turtle exhausts all his energy for one simple objective: survival. Steinbeck also introduces into this section the idea of a predatory cycle. As Ali remarked in her position paper, the trucks on the highway that “served to hit [the turtle]” (15) show how men made machinery but cannot control it. Likewise, as the truck driver’s “front wheel struck the edge of the shell… and rolled it off the highway” (15), the predator is able to prey on weaker beings from a lack of compassion. The land turtle then serves to demonstrate the perseverance, the hardships, the predatory nature of survival in the lives of the migrant workers.

            Steinbeck also employs the expository sections to distance the reader from the specific narrative of the Joad family and underline the vast effects of the capitalist economy. In one description chapter, Steinbeck traces the travel along highway 66, a “path of people in flight, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion… from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there” (118). Using the towns and cities along the highway, he adopts the mentality of the migrants to illustrate the pure terror of unanticipated obstacles that mean, literally, life and death. Steinbeck questions: “But how can such courage be, and such faith in their own species?” (122) while the brief glimpses of families on the road provide a microcosm of the greater issue at large, the ability to trust that one human being will not exploit another for the sake of his own survival. And yet, through these chapters in which Steinbeck chooses to observe the exodus at a distance, he offers some understanding: “The people in flight from the terror behind—strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever” (122).

            In a letter written in 1938, John Steinbeck expressed his objective in writing the novel: “My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other.” Through the expository chapters in which he parallels the natural world to the predatory cycle of survival in the lives of the migrant workers and furthers a political agenda of explaining the economic forces that drive human beings against each other, Steinbeck is able to guide the reader away from the single thread of the Joad family to a comprehensive view of America during the great depression.