The Grapes of Wrath Summary and Analysis

Chapters 1-5

Chapter One: Steinbeck begins the novel with a description of the dust bowl climate of Oklahoma. The dust was so thick that men and women had to remain in their houses, and when they had to leave they tied handkerchiefs over their faces and wore goggles to protect their eyes. After the wind had stopped, an even blanket of dust covered the earth. The corn crop was ruined. Everybody wondered what they would do. The women and children knew that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole, but the men had not yet figured out what to do.

Analysis:

Steinbeck begins the novel with ominous portents of the hardship to come. He describes the coming of the dust in terms befitting a biblical plague. The dust storm overwhelms Oklahoma, clouding the air and even blocking out the sun. However, when the storm ends, it is only the beginning of the hardship for the Oklahoma farmers. A sense of hopelessness sets in almost immediately. There seems to be no solution for the farmers, who are resigned to their fate and find themselves baffled at what they may have to face.

This chapter deliberately does not deal with the characters who will occupy the novel, for Steinbeck intends to place the book within a larger context. Tom Joad and his family, who will be the focus of The Grapes of Wrath, are not yet featured, for they are merely one of thousands of families to be affected by the events of the Depression. The first chapter serves to give the novel an epic sweep and to remind the reader that the book has a strong historical basis.

Chapter Two: A man approaches a small diner where a large red transport truck is parked. The man is under thirty, with dark brown eyes and high cheekbones. He wore new clothes that don't quite fit. The truck driver exits from the diner and the man asks him for a ride, despite the "No Riders" sticker on the truck. The man claims that sometimes a guy will do a good thing even when a rich bastard makes him carry a sticker, and the driver, feeling trapped by the statement, lets the man have a ride. While driving, the truck driver asks questions, and the man finally gives his name, Tom Joad. The truck driver claims that guys do strange things when they drive trucks, such as make up poetry, because of the loneliness of the job. The truck driver claims that his experience driving has trained his memory and that he can remember everything about a person he passes. Realizing that the truck driver is pressing for information, Tom finally admits that he had just been released from McAlester prison for homicide. He had been sentenced to seven years and was released after only four, for good behavior.

Analysis:

The Oklahoma City Transport Company truck is both imposing and intrusive, a symbol of corporate domination as shown by the "No Riders" sticker so prominently displayed. Tom Joad immediately picks up on the idea of business as cold and heartless when he asks the truck driver for a ride. The novel is unsparingly critical of business and the rich: they serve only to keep truck drivers isolated and bored to the point of near insanity.

There are several indications that Tom Joad is a recent prison release. His clothing is recently prison-issued: it does not quite fit him, it is far too formal ­ he walks down the road alone, wearing a suit, and is as yet spotless. He has few possessions with him. The truck driver immediately realizes Tom's recent circumstances; his probing questions, as Tom realizes, are meant to elicit the desired confession from him. The little information that Tom reveals about himself shows him to be a shrewd but uneducated man. He can barely write and does little more than hard labor, but he is clever enough to know how to manipulate the truck driver into giving him a ride.

A persistent strain of anti-elitism runs throughout the novel. As well as the contempt that Tom and the truck driver show toward big business and the rich, they also sharply criticize those who use Œbig words.' According to them, only a preacher can use educated language, for they can be trusted. In other hands, the use of big words is merely to obscure and confuse.

Chapter Three: At the side of the roadside, a turtle crawled, dragging his shell over the grass. He came to the embankment at the road and, with great effort, climbed onto the road. As the turtle attempts to cross the road, it is nearby hit by a sedan. A truck swerves to hit the turtle, but its wheel only strikes the edge of its shell and spins it back off the highway. The turtle lays on its back, but finally pulls itself over.

Analysis:

The turtle is a metaphor for the working class farmers whose stories and struggles are recounted in The Grapes of Wrath. The turtle plods along dutifully, but is consistently confronted with danger and setbacks. Significantly, the dangers posed to the turtle are those of modernity and business. It is the intrusion of cars and the building of highways that endanger the turtle. The truck that strikes it is a symbol of big business and commerce. The Joad family that will soon be introduced will experience similar travails as the turtle, as they plod along wishing only to survive, yet are brutally pushed aside by corporate interests.

Chapter Four: After getting out of the truck, Tom Joad begins walking home. He sees the turtle of the previous chapter and picks it up. He stops in the shade of a tree to rest and meets a man who sits there, singing "Jesus is My Savior." The man, Jim Casy, had a long, bony frame and sharp features. A former minister, he recognizes Tom immediately. He was a "Burning Busher" who used to "howl out the name of Jesus to glory," but he lost the calling because he has too many sinful ideas that seem sensible. Tom tells Casy that he took the turtle for his little brother, and he replies that nobody can keep a turtle, for they eventually just go off on their own. Casy claims that he doesn't know where he's going now, and Tom tells him to lead people, even if he doesn't know where to lead them. Casy tells Tom that part of the reason he quit preaching was that he too often succumbed to temptation, having sex with many of the girls he Œsaved.' Finally he realized that perhaps what he was doing wasn't a sin, and there isn't really sin or virtue ­ there are simply things people do. He realized he didn't Œknow Jesus,' he merely knew the stories of the Bible. Tom tells Casy why he was in jail: he was at a dance drunk, and got in a fight with a man. The man cut Tom with a knife, so he hit him over the head with a shovel. Tom tells him that he was treated relatively well in McAlester. He ate regularly, got clean clothes and bathed. He even tells about how someone broke his parole to go back. Tom tells how his father Œstole' their house. There was a family living there that moved away, so his father, uncle and grandfather cut the house in two and dragged part of it first, only to find that Wink Manley took the other half. They get to the boundary fence of their property, and Tom tells him that they didn't need a fence, but it gave Pa a feeling that their forty acres was forty acres. Tom and Casy get to the house: something has happened ­ nobody is there.

Analysis:

Jim Casy is the moral voice of the novel and its religious center. He is a religious icon, a philosopher and a prophet. His initials (J.C.) reveal that Steinbeck intends him to be a Christ figure espousing Steinbeck's interpretation of religious doctrine. He eschews dogma and scripture, even any semblance of a strict moral code. Instead, Casy finds the rules and regulations of Christian teachings too confining and not applicable to actual situations. The most striking case of this is his Œsins' with the women he converts. Casy originally felt tremendously guilty over his actions, worried about his responsibilities toward the women he was trying to convert to Jesus, yet finally came to the conclusion that "maybe it's just the way folks is." Casy's final more code is one without any definition. He denies the existence of virtue or vice, finding that "there's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing." His final conclusion is that all men and women are the Holy Spirit, connected by one common soul.

Steinbeck thus focuses on the common people not just politically, with the themes of poverty during the Great Depression, but as a religious entity. Casy rejects the idea of Jesus as intangible. Casy does not and cannot know Jesus, but he does know common people and believes them to be the representation of god. Even Tom's stories demonstrate a dislike of concrete religious teachings. He mocks the pious religious Christmas card that his grandmother sent him while he was in prison.

Tom's description of prison demonstrates the poverty under which he and his family live. For Tom, prison ensured that he would be fed and cared for. Now that he has reentered society, he has no such guarantee. The story of how Tom's family obtained their house further demonstrates his family's dire situation ­ to have a home, they literally have to carry one from another property. Yet Tom tells Casy this as a humorous anecdote; his poverty has become so ingrained that all that Tom can do is accept it.

Chapter Five: This chapter describes the coming of the bank representatives to evict the farmers. Some of the men were kind because they knew how cruel their job was, while some were angry because they hated to be cruel, and others were merely cold and hardened by their job. They are mostly pawns of a system that they can merely obey. The tenant system has become untenable for the banks, for one man on a tractor can take the place of a dozen families. The farmers raise the possibility of armed insurrection, but what would they fight against? They will be murderers if they stay, fighting against the wrong targets.

Steinbeck describes the arrival of the tractors. They crawled over the ground, cutting the earth like surgery and violating it like rape. The tractor driver does his job simply out of necessity: he has to feed his kids, even if it comes at the expense of dozens of families. Steinbeck dramatizes a conversation between a truck driver and an evicted tenant farmer. The farmer threatens to kill the driver, but even if he does so, he will not stop the bank. Another driver will come. Even if the farmer murders the president of the bank and board of directors, the bank is controlled by the East. There is no effective target which could prevent the evictions.

Analysis:

Even more than the coming of the dust, the arrival of the bankers is an ominous event. For Steinbeck, the banks have no redeeming value. They are completely devoid of human characteristics ­ they are monstrosities that "breathe profits" and can never be satiated. Steinbeck explicitly states that bank is inhuman, and the bank owner with fifty thousand acres is a "monster." A bank is made by me but is something more than and separate from people, a destructive force that pursues short term profits at the expense of the land, destroying it through cotton production that drains the land of its resources.

Steinbeck describes the movement of the tractors over the ground as indiscriminate and hostile. The tractors move arbitrarily over all land, violently slicing the ground with their blades. Steinbeck first equates the plowing with surgery, but goes further to compare it with rape: a cold and passionless intrusion into the land unconnected with human emotion.

According to Steinbeck, it is a personal connection to the land that determines ownership. A man who does not reside on his land and walk upon it cannot own it; rather, the property controls the man and he becomes the servant of the land.

In this critique of the bank, the behavior of the employees is largely excusable. They are "caught in something larger than themselves," controlled by the mathematics of bank operations and slaves to the company that has ensnared them. The situation that the bank poses for the farmers leaves them no options. They cannot defend the land, for they would be murdering men who are not responsible for their fate. They can only leave. The tractor drivers face a similar situation. Despite the consequences to others, they have to work somehow to feed their families. They are not responsible for what they do, for they are controlled by larger forces.

The conversation between the tenant farmer and the tractor driver illustrates how diffuse the controlling corporate system is. If a farmer wanted to stop the bank, he could not target one individual or even a small group; even if a farmer murdered the bank president, it would not stop the process of evictions. The people are helpless.