The Grapes of Wrath: Question 3: Part 2

The story focuses mostly on the struggles of the Joad family and the conflict of the tenant farmers getting kicked off of their land, which affected many, many families, so it would be easy to say that the theme of family plays a big part in the novel.

When the Joad family was preparing to leave for California, they decided that they were going to leave earlier than they had previously thought. “And then all of a sudden, the family began to function. Pa got up and a lighted another lantern. Noah from a box in the kitchen, brought out the bow-bladed butchering knife and whetted it on a worn little carborundum stone. And he laid the scraper on the chopping block, and the knife beside it. Pa brought two sturdy sticks, each three feet long, and pointed the ends with an ax, and he tied strong ropes, double half-hitched, to the middle of the sticks” (Steinbeck 104). This shows just how well connected and trained the Joad family is because they all know their duty, their part in the preparing for salting some pigs in this case.

When Steinbeck was telling the story of the masses of people who made one-night tent communities he said “In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families 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” (Steinbeck 193). This shows how the families on the road basically formed one family every night with whoever else was camped there because they all shared the same fears, losses, and dream of working in the California sun.

In the final chapter, when the little boy in the barn was telling about how his father gave the boy his food; “Says he wasn’t hungry, or he jus’ et. Give me the food. Now he’s too weak. Can’t hardly move” (Steinbeck 454).This shows how in even the most dire circumstances, looking starvation in the face, a father would gladly, willingly, give up his food so that his son may eat and live another day.

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