The Grapes of Wrath: Chapter 5

So chapter 5 seems to me like a very important one because it is when all of the farmers get kicked off of their land, which kicks off the rest of the events in the book.

This chapter easily reveals how Steinbeck feels about banks and companies. There is definitely a bias towards the tenant farmers even though he never really states directly that it is a single person or a party’s fault, it’s just the way things work. The only people that he really “demonizes” are the banks. Even though the owners are the ones responsible for the land, the reader feels bad for them too because of the way that the owners tell the farmers they don’t want to kick them off, it’s just the way the banks work. With passages like, “Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank—or the Company—needs—wants—insists—must have—as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them,” it is easy for the reader to not only sympathize with the farmers, but also with the owners for having to ruin these people’s lives (Steinbeck 31).

Another revealing reaction is when the farmers find out that the tractor driver working for the banks is one of their own, a son of a fellow farmer. When they confront him about it, all he has to say is, “Three dollars a day. I got damn sick of creeping for my dinner—and not getting it. I got a wife and kids. We got to eat. Three dollars a day, and it comes every day.” He claims that “times are changing” and that people are going to have to start looking out for themselves and their families instead of everybody else (Steinbeck 37).

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