Sean Kim
Mrs. Kent
English 3H
12 January 2015
Grapes of Wrath Reading Record
Title: Grapes of Wrath
Author: John Steinbeck
Genre: Epic; realistic fiction; social commentary
Setting: Late May-late October 1938, Oklahoma, California
Point of View: The point of view moves drastically between diverse perspectives. In a few parts, the storyteller depicts occasions comprehensively, condensing the encounters of an extensive number of individuals and giving authentic investigation. Regularly, in the same sections, the storyteller expect the voice of a commonplace individual, for example, an uprooted rancher or an abnormal utilized auto businessperson, communicating that 's individual concerns.
Atmosphere: The atmosphere of this story is much oppressed
Ma is presented as a lady who purposely and happily satisfies her part as "the bastion of the family." She is basically the healer of the family 's ills and the mediator of its contentions, and her capacity to perform these errands becomes as the novel advances. Pa Joad is Ma Joad 's spouse and Tom 's dad. Pa Joad is an Oklahoma sharecropper who has been ousted from his homestead. A candid, decent hearted man, Pa guides the push to take the family to California. Once there, not able to discover work and progressively edgy, Pa ends up searching to Ma Joad for quality and initiative, however he some of the time feels embarrassed about his weaker position.
Grampa Joad: Tom Joad 's granddad. The originator of the Joad ranch, Grampa is currently old and sick. When he had a barbarous and fierce temper, Grampa 's underhandedness is presently restricted practically only to his tongue. He has a great time tormenting his wife and stunning others with wicked talk. Despite the fact that his character serves generally to create silly impact, he displays a genuine and strong association with the area. The family is compelled to medication him so as to get him to leave the property; evacuated from his common component, in any case, Grampa soon bites the
We know everything, from where Ma Joad keeps her letters, news clippings, and trinkets, to the precise part that is expected to settle the Wilson 's visiting auto. Actually, Steinbeck is so great at being exact that when we complete The Grapes of Wrath, we 've earned our PhDs in the specialty of auto workman repair. His parts that treat the Joad family are brimming with vivacious, bright dialog that nearly approximates the sound and rhythms of the Oklahoma discourse designs. We sense that we are in that spot, going nearby the Joads. Steinbeck blends his parts about the Joads with sections that investigate the life and times of the Dust Bowl through a wide, recorded lens. These sections have a tendency to accept a continuous flow, as it delineates banks expelling sharecroppers, degenerate auto sales people offering broken-down autos for an excessive amount of cash, and even the very clean storms that destroy the area. In these occasions, Steinbeck uses bunches of reiteration, making the dialect appear to be just about dreamlike and underscoring the urgent times of the Dust Bowl
Tom Joad is an ex-convict that was only into his own self-interest and lived by a mantra of live your life day by day and not concerned with the future, to becoming a man who thinks about the future and someone with morals and an obligation to help others. Ma Joad is a typical woman of the early 1900’s whose main role was a mother only with a role of caring and nurturing. Later in the novel, she becomes an important figure for the family and is responsible for making decisions in keeping the family together and emphasizes the importance of unity. Another important transition in the book is the family starting off as a single close knit unit to depending on other families to survive. This common interest and struggle bonded the community of individual families to a single one. Steinbeck wrote this novel very well, by having great character dynamics and development that displays the characters strengths and also their
Point of view-The story is told by the point of view of Chief Bromden, a patient at a mental health hospital. He expresses his own emotions as well as providing background details on the characters and setting which enables the readers to comprehend the story better.
Throughout the novel, Steinbeck portrays the Joads and other exiled "Okies" as animalistic. They often talk about their dilemma in simplistic terms that hint that they are not initially aware of the specific conditions that force them to abandon their home. For example, Muley Graves tells Tom Joad and Jim Casy that the rest of the Joads, with their house destroyed, are "piled in John's house like gophers in a winter burrow” (63). This illustrates a family of animals that are bundled together, hoping to fend off a predator with their superior numbers. They see the societal problems around them in terms of a predator as well. For example, Casy asks a worker at a gas station, "You ever seen one a t...
As soon as the Joads leave their farm, it is evident who is the leader of the family. Once Pa is taken off his land his leadership is gone, he becomes lost without having to deal with the strict regimen of farming. With out waiting around for Pa to get over his loss Ma steps up to lead the family and make crucial decisions. Ma foresees the way the family will deteriorate without proper leadership and thus she takes what little strength they all have left and pushes the family west together. This shift in power is obvious from the beginning; when the family is leaving Tom asks if Casey could come along with them and is it Ma who steps in to respond, "It aint kin we?
One of America’s most beloved books is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The book portrays a family, the Joads, who leave Oklahoma and move to California in search of a more prosperous life. Steinbeck’s book garnered acclaim both from critics and from the American public. The story struck a chord with the American people because Steinbeck truly captured the angst and heartbreak of those directly impacted by the Dust Bowl disaster. To truly comprehend the havoc the Dust Bowl wreaked, one must first understand how and why the Dust Bowl took place and who it affected the most. The Dust Bowl was the result of a conglomeration of weather, falling crop prices, and government policies.
Through such hardships as the Depression, the Dust Bowl summers, and trying to provide for their own families, which included the search for a safe existence, we find the story of the Joad's. The Joad's are the main family in John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, which he created to give voice to the hundreds of families that found themselves at their absolute rock bottom during the Great Depression of the 20th Century in America.
Ma Joad is a woman of strength and hope who is the backbone of the family. She represents the Mother Nature archetype while she posses the physical aspect of guiding the family and staying strong when the family needs her most. Steinbecks shows the importance of ma's character by the syntax usage to describe ma. " Ma was heavy, but not fat; thick with child-bearing and work...her ankles, and her strong, broad, bare feet moved quickly and deftly over the floor", Ma is described with these features to show her strength as a mother who has control and survives through hard situations (95). Her 'bare feet' being close to the earth shows how she takes on a 'Mother Nature' archetype to her character. She is one with the earth just as Mother Nature is. Mother Nature is one that gives birth, produces, sustains life and nurtures her family. All of these archetypes are expressed in ma's character.
In the beginning of the novel, Steinbeck describes the devastating Dust bowl that settles “on the corn, on roofs,” and blankets “the weeds and trees” (Steinbeck 3). His use of imagery instantly installs the picture of destruction into the reader’s mind. The Dust Bowl is the beginning of the hardships that are to come for the migrants. There is an anecdote of a turtle who struggles to get to the other side of the road. The turtle struggles up the embankment like the families struggled to get to California. When he was trying to cross the highway he was nearly hit twice, which is similar to the business owners and Californians running over the Oklahoma people. This small chapter symbolizes the entire journey of the Joad family, in turn it symbolizes the journey of all the Oklahoma people. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side.
On the account of manslaughter, Tom Joad was sentenced to four years of prison which he was just released for. He then hitchhiked a ride with a trucker to his family’s farm. When he get’s there, he discovers that they are living with Uncle Joad since they lost their farm to landowners. They leave hoping to get better job opportunities.
Point of View: The narrator’s point of view in the story is 3rd person omniscient which is when the narrator describes feelings from most of the people in the story and not one person.
As the Joads near California, they hear ominous rumors of overcrowded camps and an overflowing labor market; one migrant tells Pa Joad that twenty thousand people show up for every eight hundred jobs, and that his own children starved to death in California. But the Joads press on, and eventually reach their destination. They move from camp to camp to squalid camp, looking in vain for work, struggling to find food, and struggling to hold the family together. Tom’s younger sister Rose of Sharon is pregnant and fearful that her child will be born deformed or even dead; eventually, her husband Connie abandons the family.
The ordinary world is the first stage of the journey for the hero. The normal life of the hero is revealed before the quest begins. The Joads lead a life very common for Midwestern, 1930s families. They own 40 acres of farmland in Sallisaw, Oklahoma. The grandparents, Grampa and Granma, lead the household. Pa and Ma are the middle aged adults living on the farm. Pa and Ma have 6 children- Al, Tom, Rosasharn, Noah, Ruthie, and Winfield. The entire family living together is characteristic of the time period. The family only knows the farming lifestyle. So, like the majority of farming families in the 1930s, the Joads were negatively affected by the Dust Bowl and
As they are on the road heading towards California, they notice that grandpa’s health is declining terribly. As they are on the long road to California from their Oklahoma farm, they keep close eyes on Grandpa’s health, when they get to a place where they can rest and take a break, tom breaks his probation terms and becomes illegal to be with them, and then Grampa Joad passes away in the middle of the night (“Grapes”). As they lose one family member, they realize the reason he had died was the medication they gave him, so that they could began on their journey to California to live a better life.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck had many comparisons from the movie and the book. In 1939, this story was to have some of the readers against the ones that kept the American people in poverty held responsible for their actions. This unique story was about the Joad’s family, who were migrant workers looking for a good decent job. They were also farmers from Oklahoma that are now striving to find some good work and success for their family in California. This novel was one of Steinbeck’s best work he has ever done. It was in fact an Academy Award movie in 1940. Both the movie and the novel are one of Steinbeck’s greatest masterpieces on both the filmmaking and the novel writing. Both the novel and film are mainly the same in the beginning of the story and towards the end. There were some few main points that Steinbeck took out from the book and didn’t mention them in the movie. “The Grapes of Wrath is a
In the novel The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, a fictitious migrant family, the Joads, travel west in search of a new life away from the tragedies of the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma. Along the way, Steinbeck adds a variety of minor characters with whom the Joads interact. Steinbeck created these minor characters to contrast with the Joad’s strong will power and to reflect man’s fear of new challenges, and to identify man’s resistance to change. Three minor characters who fulfill this role are Muley Graves, Connie Rivers, and the tractor driver.