“Like William Faulkner and Willa Cather, John Steinbeck wrote his best fiction about the region in which he grew up and the people he knew from his childhood…” Paul McCarthySay no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get an original essay Steinbeck's novels about ordinary people and the troubles that beset them have earned him a reputation as one of the greatest American writers. He has employed various forms, from short stories to allegories to morality plays, but his approach is always realistic. Critics often feel that the realism is marred by its sentimentality, but Steinbeck's clear, energetic writing and sensitive treatment of his characters are considered his strengths. Granville Hicks's 1939 review in The New Masses declared The Grapes of Wrath an exemplary proletarian novel, noting that "Steinbeck's vision of capitalism illuminates every chapter of the book." Yet another critic, Joseph Fontenrose, believes that “The Grapes of Wrath is the product of Steinbeck's own experience and direct observation; its realism is authentic. » Telling a story is a huge task, but telling it with the essence of the environment in which it takes place surely requires great effort on the part of the writer. The Grapes of Wrath, one of the most brilliant and innovative novels of the era, can be read not only as fiction but also as a social document of the times, an account of drought conditions, economic problems and the life of sharecroppers. Not distinct from fiction, this level of recording is an essential aspect. The novel is a precise and moving account of mass migration during the American Great Depression. Steinbeck highlights social injustice, traditional religious beliefs, the implications of the transcendentalist belief that each person is part of the higher soul and that individual actions cannot be interpreted as good or bad. The family as a source of strength for its members and for the community as a whole is another important theme of the book. The document clarifies the nature of family life and small farming and the underlying concepts. One of the most important themes is the traditional agrarian idea of ​​a simple rural life based on the principles of natural rights. Those who live and work the land, who pay for it with their blood, sweat and toil, own the land. Muley Graves believes it, and to a certain extent, so do the Joads. The Joad family is a universal symbol of the need for group effort and support to accomplish the greatest good for the greatest number of people. The world presented to us in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath has an inexorable quality in which, at every moment, great and invisible forces seem to be acting on vulnerable human beings. The tractors razing Oklahoma farms, the bankers evicting farmers from their land, the Joad family's move across the country to California, the deaths along the family's journey, and the growing flood which surrounds the characters of the last film. The chapters of the novel all make us feel the helplessness of the individual in the face of the effects of nature and the economy. To the story of Tom Joad and his family, their long, unsteady and arduous journey west, their exhausted efforts to make a living in California, and the bitter resistance they encounter among the wealthy, gluttonous landowners and selfish, Steinbeck added agreat sky-blue vision of things as they really were at the time the novel was written. It is his notion of the super-soul, the soul of the world of which each individual has his modest and particular part. Former preacher and future martyr Jim Casy puts it this way: “Maybe all men have a great soul and everyone is a part of it. » This doctrine also forms the philosophical basis of Tom Joad's famous speech to his mother after Casy's death. Tom Joad is about to leave, to continue the whole fight in secret. Her mother asks, “How will I know about you?” They could kill you and I wouldn't know. Tom laughed uncomfortably and said, "Well, maybe like Casy says, a guy doesn't have a soul of his own, just a piece of a big one...and so...then that doesn't matter." doesn't matter. Then I'll be all over the place in the dark. I'll be everywhere, wherever you look. Wherever there is a fight so that hungry people can eat. I'll be there. If there's a cop beating up a guy, I'll be there. If Casy knew, well, I'd be like guys scream when they're angry and I'd be like kids laugh when they're hungry and they know dinner is ready. And when our people eat what they raise and live in the houses they build, well, I'll be there. See?" (Steinbeck 385) The Joads refuse to be broken by their situation. They maintain their composure, their nobility, and their self-esteem, despite the trials and tribulations that befall them. Hunger, tragic death, and mistreatment by authorities does not break their morale. Their dignity in the face of tragedy contrasts with the baseness of rich landowners and cops who treated migrant workers like criminals No matter how much misfortune and degradation is inflicted on them. Joads, their sense of justice, family and honor never wavered Steinbeck believed that as long as people entertained a sense of injustice, a sense of anger against those who sought to undermine their pride, they would not lose. never their dignity. Tom Joad is the symbol of all the mistreated poor workers who refuse to give up. In order to appreciate The Grapes of Wrath as a story of its times, it is worth taking a look. on the burning issues of the times in which it was written. The book is set during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Hard times were made even tougher in Oklahoma and four other states when drought and poor farming methods led to wind erosion of the topsoil. The Great Plains thus became known as the “Dust Bowl.” Nearly two million sharecroppers have been driven off their land, unable to pay their rent to the banks that own their farms. A third of a million farm workers left the Dust Bowl for California, where they thought they could make a living off the rich, fertile land. However, there were many more migrant farmers than jobs, allowing landowners to treat workers very poorly. Apart from that, the thirties were a decade of staggering unemployment in America – reaching 25% in 1933, and still hovering around 19% in 1938, the year Steinbeck made The Grapes of Wrath. He did not hesitate to attribute part of the responsibility for the catastrophic conditions to the "Bank", the "Society" and the "State"; that is, to faceless and bloodless corporate, institutional and bureaucratic organizations, so his novel has an extremely harsh and angry edge, although it offers no practical response to a displaced population by the transition from agricultural to industrial economies. The migration of hundredsof thousands of people westward constitutes a major cultural phenomenon of the 1930s. Steinbeck's sentimental depiction of this phenomenon is another example of The Grapes of Wrath as a form of social document. From the beginning of the novel, we sense a dark mood in the description of the Dust Bowl, the event that causes everything else that happens. of the novel. We see the “earth” becoming crusted and the “sky” becoming “pale”, “pink in the red country and white in the gray country”. (Steinbeck 5) The description is like that of a wasteland, where "men and women huddled in their houses, and they tied handkerchiefs over their noses when they went out, and wore glasses to protect their eyes (Steinbeck 6) » Later we see that the people's almost futile struggle against the dust is illustrated in his account of how "the houses were tightly closed and the cloths stuck around the doors and windows, but the dust came in so finely that we could not see it in the air, and it settled” like pollen on chairs and tables, on dishes (Steinbeck 6). »The novel also attacks the very assumptions about private property and class difference on which the social order ideologically rests. Far from being simply racist, it presents one of the most radical critiques of the social order in all of popular – and canonical – literature. Thus, his political intervention was, is and will likely remain contradictory. We see in the novel that Joads, like thousands of other families, are forced to sell their possessions at ridiculously low prices before leaving for California. Anything not sold must be burned, even items of sentimental value that simply cannot be taken on a trip due to lack of space. Steinbeck is explicit about the humiliating process of selling obsolete goods. As we see in chapter 9: “You're not just buying junk, you're buying junk lives. And even more, you will see, you are buying bitterness (Steinbeck 80).” Farmers have attached their feelings to their possessions (which is quite natural), they have associated life and death with their land and abandoning their possessions brings them nothing but pure disappointment and deep sorrow . Steinbeck highlights the helplessness of these poor farmers forced to act against their will. The narrative voice expressing the inner feelings of the farmers makes readers fully experience what they had to experience during the migration: “you buy years of work, of toil in the sun; you buy a sorrow that cannot speak. But be careful, sir. There's a bounty with that pile of junk and those bay horses - so beautiful - a bundle of bitterness to grow in your home and blossom, one day. We could have saved you, but you have cut us down, and soon you will be cut down and there will be none of us to save you (Steinbeck 81). The feelings of these farmers, their helplessness against the forced pressure of capitalist society and their ultimate fate are expressed with such vividness that the reader cannot help but appreciate the writer's careful observation. We find deep sadness in these farmers' helpless questions: "How can we live without our lives?" How will we know it’s us without our past? No, leave it. Burn it (Steinbeck 82). Another example of the natural association with land and possessions can be seen in the death of grandfather. He couldn't dissociate and separate himself from the place he thought he owned. Casy is absolutely right when he says, after Grandpa's death, that "he was always doing stupid things." I think he knew it. A grandfather did not die last night. He died at theminute you took him away (Steinbeck 134). And further, he says: “He just stays with the country. He couldn't leave him. (Steinbeck 134). In fact, The Grapes of Wrath arguably became a site of confrontation between the anti-capitalist consciousness of the 1930s and the American racist tradition – between manifest destiny and overt exploitation and dispossession. Seen from a Marxist point of view, one can gain a very vivid understanding of the bitter capitalist issues in the novel. Marxist theory of criticism examines the economic and governmental system that Steinbeck uses throughout the novel and reveals that he does indeed believe that capitalism is naturally imperfect. According to Mary Klages, “Marxists want to analyze social relations in order to change them, in order to modify what they see as the gross injustices and inequalities created by capitalist economic relations (Klages 126).” In The Grapes of Wrath, we see that Steinbeck confronts this ideal and reveals what he believes about it. He begins his great confrontation with capitalism by creating the feeling that there are two classes and a third stuck somewhere in between. At first, Tom Joad wants to hitch a ride with a driver who has a "No Riders" sticker on the truck. Tom makes the driver bound and twisted in his emotions and moral feelings by saying, "Sometimes a guy will be a good guy even if some rich bastard makes him wear a bumper sticker...the driver has considered the parts of this answer." If he refused now, not only was he not a good guy, but he was forced to wear a sticker and wasn't allowed to have company. The driver is forced to believe that to be a “good guy,” he must put aside his pride and help his neighbor. Tom tries to make the driver understand that a man doesn't need to work for "a rich bastard" to be an honest person. Here again, in chapter 5, more than the arrival of the dust, the arrival of the bankers is an equally worrying event. For Steinbeck, banks have no redeeming value. They are completely devoid of human characteristics. They are monstrosities that “breathe profit” and can never be satiated. Steinbeck explicitly states that the bank is inhumane and that the bank owner who owns fifty thousand acres is a "monster." “Banking is something other than men. Sometimes everyone in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. Banking is more than just people, I tell you. It's the monster. Men did it, but they can't control it (Steinbeck 32). A bank is created by men, but it is something more and separate from the people, a destructive force that seeks short-term profits at the expense of the land, destroying it through the production of cotton which drains the land of its resources. The poor farmers do not know who to blame, who to curse and who to “shoot” for their suffering. The conversation between the farmer and the tractor driver illustrates how diffuse the company's control system is. If a farmer wanted to stop the bank, he could not target an individual or even a small group; Even if a farmer assassinated the bank president, it would not stop the process of evictions. People are helpless. » But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I do not aim to starve before killing the man who is starving me (Steinbeck 37). » We find this same futile struggle of farmers to locate the central point of their miseries throughout the novel. Where should they go? Who should they blame and what course of action should be taken in such circumstances? Steinbeckbrings to light all these bitter and yet so realistic questions of this time, to finally focus more on the extreme endurance of the sick. The narrative becomes surprisingly engaging in the chapters where it highlights the voices of farmers who complain about the capitalist system: “Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows bad? If this tractor was ours, it would be nice – not mine, but ours. If our tractor traveled the long furrows of our land, it would be good. Not my land, but ours. We would then love this tractor as we loved this land when it was ours. But this tractor does two things: it turns the earth and it makes us leave the earth. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. People are motivated, intimidated, hurt by both. We need to think about it (Steinbeck 138). Conditions for farmworkers during the Depression era were as bad, if not worse, than those of southern farmers and sharecroppers. Although there was a small permanent workforce on California farms, the vast majority of work was needed at harvest time and was done by migrant workers who followed the crops as they matured over a period of time. six-month harvest season. By the 1930s, wages and working conditions had been terrible for at least sixty years. Migrant workers owned few possessions, lived in unsanitary company housing or makeshift camps, and had to provide their own transportation – usually old “cars”. Their children had limited or no access to school and they had little health care, making malnutrition and preventable illnesses common. Steinbeck complemented the description of this difficult time by illustrating people's hopes of earning a decent wage and eventually purchasing their own land. And he included historical content to illustrate the interactions between the different people who endured their lives during the Depression, whether rich or poor, landowners or renters, or struggling corporations or small businesses. The constant struggle of these workers can be summed up in Ma Joad's words as they become disoriented at one point in their journey. She said to Tom, “You have to be patient. Well, Tom, we people will live on when all these people are gone. Well, Tom, we are the people who live. They are not going to eliminate us. Well, we are the people – we carry on (Steinbeck 258). » One of Steinbeck's major messages in the novel is that socialist revolt is the way to solve economic problems. He believes that people must come together for the survival of all humanity, as he says: “This is the beginning, from “I” to “we”. » He is of the opinion that “if you are in problem, or suffering or need – go to the poor. They are the only ones who can help – the only ones. We observe that the central artistic problem is to present the universal and the epic in terms of the individual and the particular. Steinbeck chooses to address this problem by creating an individual and particular picture of the epic experience of the dispossessed Okies by focusing sustained attention on the experience of the Joads. The result is an organic combination of structures. The characterization of these Joads is very interesting. The structure of the novel required that these characters be individualized to be credible and universalized to fulfill their representative functions. Steinbeck addresses these issues by making each of the Joads a specific individual and making it clear that what happens to the Joads is typical of the era. The means used by Steinbeck to maintain the identity of these,,2012.