Exploring the power of the human Spirit in the Grapes of Wrath

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IB2 English A1 HL

Christina Sophonpanich

“Writers have always been concerned with the freedom of the human spirit, whether through dreaming, solitude or rebellion.”

Exploring the power of the human Spirit in John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath

Set in America during the great depression, The Grapes of Wrath opens up with the bleak backdrop of the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma, where the anguished and undernourished land is a parallel to the famine and poverty which the tenants are suffering from. Steinbeck immediately draws the reader into a dire situation where, during a transitory stage from handwork to machinery, tenants cannot keep up with the developing world of technology and hence are losing the land their families for generations back have been born on, worked on, and died on.

Like countless others of that time, the Joad family has been forced to surrender their land to bank magistrates and are reduced to homeless migrants. The reader is taken on an epic yet tragic journey across America, following the Joad family westward from their home in Oklahoma all the way to the golden state of California, in search of work and opportunity.

Through the use of interchapters, Steinbeck reinforces the concept of the Joad family serving only as a representative of the plight of the migrants as a whole, and hence zooms in on the Joad family and out again to emphasize the significance of the wider spectrum encompassing all migrants suffering the same fate.

The story explores in great depth the universal themes of freedom, unity perseverance, determination and generosity through the struggle for survival against all odds. As his ultimate masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck’s exposition of the strength and power of the human spirit.

From the beginning of the novel, the reader is shown the cruelty of mankind, and the inhumanity of one man to another, in the struggle for survival. The main problems of the migrants stem not from the weather or nature, but are rooted in the selfishness of other men. Throughout the novel, recurring displays of egocentricity contrast greatly with the altruism of the migrant people towards each other, and how actions become self-perpetuating and cyclical manifestations of morality. We learn that the greed of the wealthy landowners and business men who adopted a system of profit which result in the unemployment of thousands of tenants will ultimately lead to their downfall, as expressed in the interchapter 19, “And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with all 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.” (page 249) Yet we also see how a kind act is returned, when the waitress Mae, out of pity and good heartedness, drastically reduces the prices of bread and candy so that two undernourished children can eat, and how a truck driver admires her benevolence hence leaving her a very generous tip.

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Steinbeck goes to great lengths throughout the novel to explore the theme of unity, and the shift from “I” to “We”. This is first seen when Tom Joad returns home and becomes a unit with his family again. The emotive description of Ma in chapter 8, “She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken…She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be ...

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