The Grapes of Wrath: No One Man, But One Common Soul

The Grapes of Wrath: No One Man, But One Common Soul

Many writers in American literature try to instill the philosophy

of their choosing into their reader. This is often a philosophy derived at

from their own personal experiences. John Steinbeck is no exception to

this. When traveling through his native Californian in the mid-1930s,

Steinbeck witnessed people living in appalling conditions of extreme

poverty due to the Great Depression and the agricultural disaster known as

the Dust Bowl. He noticed that these people received no aid whatsoever

from neither the state of California nor the federal government. The rage

he experienced from seeing such treatment fueled his novel The Grapes of

Wrath. Steinbeck sought to change the suffering plight of these farmers

who had migrated from the midwest to California. Also, and more

importantly, he wanted to suggest a philosophy into the reader, and insure

that this suffering would never occur again (Critical 1). Steinbeck shows

in The Grapes of Wrath that there is no one man, but one common soul in

which we all belong to.

The subject of Steinbeck's fiction is not the most thoughtful,

imaginative, and constructive aspects of humanity, but rather the process

of life itself (Wilson 785). Steinbeck has been compared to a twentieth

century Charles Dickens of California; a social critic with more sentiment

than science or system. His writing is warm, human, inconsistent,

occasionally angry, but more often delighted with the joys associated with

human life on its lowest levels (Holman 20). This biological image of man

creates techniques and aspects of form capable of conveying this image of

man with esthetic power and conviction; the power to overcome adversity

through collectiveness, or in this case, as one combined soul(Curley 224).

Steinbeck's basic purpose of the novel is essentially religious,

but not in any orthodox sense of the word. He is religious in that he

contemplates man's relation to the cosmos and attempts to transcend

scientific explanations based on sense experience. He is also religious in

that he explicitly attests the holiness of nature (Curley 220). A common

fear during the nineteenth century was one of this naturalism leading to

the end of reverence, worship, and sentiment. Steinbeck, however, is the

first significant author to build his own set of beliefs, which some would

refer to as a “religion,” upon a naturalistic basis. Because of his “

religious” style on a naturalistic basis, he is able to relate man with a

natural soul that they own, and combine them into a grouping of a larger,

more important soul (220).

America and American literature was founded on the spirit of