John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath

The novel The Grapes of Wrath written by John Steinbeck is a beautifully described tale of hardship and perseverance. Steinbeck started off by placing the scene in the Dust Bowl and then told the story of the Joads family and their journey to California. The Joads were among many thousands of families who lost everything in the Dust Bowl and who fled the country’s heartland to find work.
When the Joads arrived in California, they found it to be overrun with workers, and still struggled to survive. Steinbeck ended the book in an abandoned barn, the outside world flooded, literally, and the Joads family having to make a hard decision. The story ends with Rose of Sharon nursing a man back from the edge of starvation with her dead baby’s milk.
The ending is simple yet with the hidden meaning that in such an epic and tragic event there is hope. Steinbeck wants the reader to believe that things will turn out all right in the end.
John Steinbeck wrote this book for a reason, to express the underlying message that life is full of obstacles and hardship, and that as humans we can always overcome those issues with hard work and perseverance. Throughout the book, Steinbeck demonstrates this philosophy in many varied ways, such as through the setting and the characterization of the folks we meet throughout the book. At the start of the novel, Steinbeck described a scene where homes and crops were covered in dust from the Dust Bowl that swept across Oklahoma. The people had to cover their mouths and noses, and shove cloth under the doors. When the dust had seized its wrath, the farmers, with no hope left, came out and saw their now ruined lives. “Then they asked, What’ll we do? And the men replied, I don’t know. But it was all right. The women knew it was all right.” (4) They persevered and kept their heads held high and just hoped. Hoped to get out “all right”. This is one of the first examples of how the setting shows the philosophy of hope. When the Joads family lost their home, they had no where else to live but in their car, “The house was dead, and the fields were dead; the Joads’ truck was the only active thing, the living principle. “The ancient Hudson, with bent and scarred radiator screen, with grease in the dusty globules at the worn edges of every moving part, with hub caps gone and caps of red dust in other places – this was the new hearth, the living center of the family; half passenger car and half truck, high-sided and clumsy.” (122)
This family made the best of crossing the country to try to have a better life. Even though they were miserable, and sick of each other, and there truck was a piece of work, they persevered. It resembled the challenge that they were all facing. The fully packed truck in which they could barely move, having to dig a grave for a dear relative, some ruffians stopping the car, and of course the long and tiring journey. But by the end of the journey they made it to their destination. It might not have been what they were looking for, but it was a place to be.
At the end of the novel, Steinbeck created a final setting obstacle for the Joads to work through. He made it rain, “The afternoon was silver with rain, the roads glittered with water. Hour by hour the cotton plants seemed to blacken and shrivel. Pa and Al and Uncle John made trip after trip into the thickets and brought back loads of dead wood. They piled it near the door, until the heap of it nearly reached the ceiling, and at last they stopped and walked toward the stove. Streams of water ran from their hats to their shoulders. The edges of their coats dripped and their shoes squished as they walked.” (476) The storm that made the Joads and plenty of other families hide in their boxcars till they were forced, out of support, to keep the Joads box car dry for a birthing. The storm made the wives make coffee all night. The storm eventually made its way into the boxcars, and filled the cars and sense of escape for all the families vanished. The storm finally made Ma and Rose of Sharon anxious and so they headed for higher ground. It was the storm that pushed people to find solutions, to create new paths in their lives, to get out of that situation.
John Steinbeck was trying to demonstrate that no matter how tough the situation was there was always a new path, a better path, to bring you out of the darkness and into the sunshine. He was suggesting that to get out of a bad situation and on with one’s life, there will be dilemmas to face. He tried to say in the mix of all the hardship that it might seem grueling, but that it is possible to endure. Although the author used the setting of the book to state his implication he also used intense characterization of the characters Tom Joad meets an old preacher named Jim Casy who confesses that he gave up preaching because he didn’t truly believe in the Holy values anymore. He was done lying to himself that he believed in what he was preaching. Steinbeck writes, “ ‘I got to thinkin’ like this- ‘Here’s me preachin’ grace. An’ here’s them people getin’ grace so hard they’re jumpin’ an’ shoutin’. Now they say layin’ up with a girl comes from the devil. But the more grace a girl got in her, the quicker she want to go out in the grass.’”(22) In translation: He was preaching beliefs that the people listening understood more than himself. Steinbeck later writes, “Before I know it, I was sayin’ out loud, ‘The hell with it! There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.” (24) He was saying that all the religious values that he was supposed to believe in were not true to him anymore. He thought that their only concerns of what people are fond of doing. Jim Casy goes through obstacles of the mind. He didn’t know what to do as a preacher because he was supposed to think one way, the way of God and the way of all his followers, but Casy couldn’t do it. He overcame his problem by just being himself, and projecting his thoughts and beliefs instead of something he doesn’t believe in. Which meant quitting preaching.
Jim Casy is a good representation of what John Steinbeck was trying to prove with his underlying message, that we can overcome problems by just being ourselves.
We all go through grief in our lives, and in the novel Tom reveals that Uncle John once had a wife and that she died of a bellyache that didn’t get attention after she told her husband. He blamed himself for her death. It reads, “He figures it’s his fault his woman died. Funny fella. He’s all the time makin it up to somebody- givin’ kids stuff, droppin’ a sack of meal on somebody’s porch. Give away about ever’thing he got, an’ still he ain’t very happy.” (73) The way Uncle John dealt with his grief may not have been very helpful but that’s how he coped. He pushed through the obstacle of his wife’s death by blaming himself and trying to make up for that by random acts of kindness. Again, Steinbeck used characterization to effortlessly insert his underlying message of how there are many obstacles in our lives but to get through them you have to press on and create new paths out of the hitches in the
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The Grapes of Wrath is a novel about overcoming hardship and pushing through obstacles no matter what it takes.
Steinbeck highlights not only the deeply personal experiences of the Joad family, but he delivers this astounding philosophy for humans to break through their problems and get on the better side of things. John Steinbeck shows this underlying message through two categories: a) the setting of the book and b) the characterization of the actors. When given a setting to overcome, it is usually a literal overcoming. Such like when the crop owners had to push through their dismal lives after the Dust Bowl and try to find a better life out in California, or when the flood pushed through the camps of the migrants in California they worked and worked till their legs gave out. But they didn’t stop there; they kept figuring new ways and new ideas to solve problems. They were given a physical obstacle instead of the emotional/personal issue the characters are usually given, such as starting a new life as crop pickers for low wages, and maybe even starving to death. Some made it, but some ended up like the man in the barn in chapter 30, not haven eaten in 6 days and having to drink the milk produced from a woman. On the other hand, when the characters of The Grapes of Wrath were given obstacles to hop over, they didn’t face physical issues but more personal issues. The preacher, Jim Casy, he lusted after women “on the grass” after he preached and he didn’t feel bad about it.
He had to figure out what he really believed and stand for that. He wasn’t going to not do the things that gave him pleasure or happiness if it meant that they were wrong in the eyes of God or in the eyes of his followers. They were non-physical, but emotional struggles. The Grapes of Wrath is a narrated story that addresses a strong placed philosophy through out the book; a lesson that says you can’t give up. If you lose all your crops: start over, if you lose your wife: grieve and grieve however you need to handle it. If you loose you hope: well then you better find a better path to get that hope back. Steinbeck taught in this book that every problem has a solution, it might not be the easiest solution but everything will be all right.