The Grapes of Wrath: Chapter 17

Chapter seventeen is a very revealing chapter into the lives of the migrant farm workers and how they operated on the road as a whole.

There were these massive camps of people, and if one family stopped because there was water, then another would stop for the water and the company of the other family, and then another family would do the same, and then it would just get bigger and bigger until there were over twenty families in one camp (Steinbeck193).

When these big groups of people came together though they “became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream. And it might be that a sick child threw despair into the hearts of twenty families, of a hundred people; that a birth there in a tent kept a hundred people quiet and awestruck through the night and filled a hundred people with the birth-joy in the morning” (Steinbeck 193). This expands one what the author was talking about in chapter fourteen, how when people experiencing the same thing, they tend to come together; to become one.

With the traveling workers, “every night a world created, complete with furniture—friends made and enemis established; a world complete with graggards and with cowards, with quiet men, with humble men, with kindly men. Every night relationships that make a world, established; and every morning the world torn down like a circus” (Steinbeck 194). People got more organized and better at building the little “worlds,” and out of that, rules started coming up, and from the rules, unspoken laws came up. They were basic rules like feed hungry people, respect people’s privacy, help other people, don’t eat expensive food in the open unless you’re going to share it, no killing, stealing, or sleeping around with other girls; so basically human nature sort of laws (Steinbeck 194). A person that can play the guitar is highly prized in these communities because they can sing songs and bring people together, because who doesn’t like a good campfire sing-along? And in the morning, everything and everybody are gone and the spot ready for the next group.

Steinbeck, John, and Robert J. DeMott. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.