" Describe how the balance between specific stories about the Joad family and broader description of the migration of Dust Bowl farmers impacts the novel as a whole."
John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath, wrote the novel in a very interesting and clever format. At first glance the pattern in his writing wasn’t as obvious as many readers wanted, but as you take a step back and analysis everything in the first couple of chapters you get to start noticing this pattern about zooming in and out of the story about the Joad family. You get to see the big picture and not just one example of a family which you think has the worst luck. Zoom out chapters depicts everyone’s hardships and struggles dealing with the Great Depression, but providing chapter that specifically talk about the Joads helps the reader to feel more emotionally connected.
The Great Depression rocked the United States by the late 1920’s and most of the 1930’s, banks were closing, people lost their money, dustbowls occurred so people lost their farms too, people were fleeing to California to look for a better life that they had seen advertised in flyers. The Joad family is a perfect example of what families had to go through, from being kicked out of their farm to being starving tricked into buying Jalopies. Chapter 7, a zoomed out chapter, talks about how used car sales man deceived poor families into buying jalopies “Watch the womans’ face. If the women likes it we can screw the old man. Start ‘em on that Cad’. Then you can work em’ down to that ’26 Buick…. Show ‘em that Nash while I get the slow leak pumped up on that ’25 Dodge.” Knowing that the Joads had just bought a ‘car’ and knowing that this must had happen to them really makes you like you were the one that’s been lied and tricked into buying this piece of junk. Trough his book we can not just connect to one family, but to many also, it will be just like multiplying little Joad families by thousand and thousands times so tit think it has a good balance of variety of stories.
Chapter 26 is about people getting really frustrated and standing up for what they believed as a whole, not just one person outside in the picket fence protesting, but in a union. They are tired of being given low wages, unfair treatments, etc... This is the point of the novel when they are in their breaking point and became desperate. But take a look at the zoomed out chapter “In the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” this quote I took form the novel reflect on the entire book, we are all going to get to our breaking point from having this madness in our hearts.
Being able to connect to one family but also knowing that there were so many others in the same situation is very tricky, but thanks to John Steinbeck format of writing he made it possible. He had the just the right amount of zoom in and zoom out chapters that it didn’t made one more important.
