Once again, in chapter eleven, Steinbeck shifts the focus from the Joad family, this time to an abandoned house that some tenant farmers were forced to leave. It never states who’s house it actually is, but I am guessing that it is the Joad’s family’s house, mostly because it would make the most sense, to me at least.
Anyway, it is also another chapter where Steinbeck reveals his feelings towards what happened to the farmers and about the people who did it to them. He starts off talking about how the only thing left in the farm fields are the sheds where the tractors are stored when not being used. He compares them at length to the horses that used to plow the fields, saying “When a horse stops work and goes into the barn there is a life and a vitality left, there is a breathing and a warmth, and the feet shift on the straw, and the jaws champ on the hay, and the ears and the eyes are alive. There is warmth of life in the barn, and the heat and smell of life. But when the motor of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it like the living heat that leaves a corpse” (Steinbeck 115). So obviously, when someone starts comparing something to a corpse, they are not too fond of it. Another important passage talks about how even though the ground is made up of nitrates and phosphates and plants, that is not the land, and he compares that to how humans are made up of carbon, salt, water, calcium, etc., but that is not a human; “He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis” (Steinbeck 115).
Chapter twelve can be summed up thusly: Route 66 is the highway that most all of the farmers used to move west, car parts dealers were making the travelers pay outrageous prices, and they discouraged them by telling them that there is no work in California, but the people don’t listen and just keep going (Steinbeck 118-122). Sounds like a fun time.
Steinbeck, John, and Robert J. DeMott. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.
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