The Grapes of Wrath: Chapters 14 & 15

There was one long chapter about the Joad family, so you know what that means! A couple of short chapters that focus on other families and the moving farmers as a whole and their struggles of getting to California.

Chapter fourteen talks about how the people that already live in the western states, like California, are getting nervous that the migrant farm workers are going to start to ban together, become angry, and do something crazy like staging a revolt or something along those lines. It also talks about how the tractors are not bad, it’s just basically that it is not the farmers tractors, so they do not like them. “Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor were ours it would be good—not mine, but ours. If our tractor turned the long furrows of our land, it would be good. Not my land, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours” (Steinbeck 151). It talks about how when two (and more) men that are experiencing the same pain that is the “node, you that fear change and revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here “I lost my land” is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate—“We lost our land.” The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one” (Steinbeck 151).

Chapter fifteen shows how “normal” people, in this case diner workers, look at the migrating farmers. She claims to the truck drivers that they are the kind of people that steal things and are always begging and being a nuisance (Steinbeck 158). Then a family of farmers heading west come in and asks if they could buy a loaf of bread for ten cents, and Mae says that she only sells sandwiches, and that the loaves cost fifteen cents anyway. Then the cook, Al, tells here to sell it to them for ten cents, and then Mae sell the father two pieces of candy for a penny. As it turns out, they were supposed to be a nickel each, but it turns out Mae is nice after all. When the truck drivers see this, they leave an extra big tip, good karma you could say (Steinbeck 161).

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