The Grapes of Wrath: Chapter 13

Chapter thirteen is a very important chapter because the Joad family is finally on the road to California. The family has to worry about the car breaking down and they have to make sure that they are never too far from a town. Good thing Al and Tom are good with cars in case anything goes wrong.

Once again though, the subject of whether or not California is as great as they say it will be comes up, this time it is between Al and Ma Joad. Al says “Ain’t you thinkin’ what’s it gonna be like when we get there? Ain’t you scared it won’t be nice like we thought?” and Ma Joad replies with “No, no I ain’t. You can’t do that. I can’t do that. It’s too much—livin’ too many lives. Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll on’y be one. If I go ahead on all of ‘em, it’s too much. You got to live ahead ‘cause you’re so young, but—it’s jus’ the road goin’ by for me. An’ it’s jus’ how soon they gonna wanta eat some more pork bones” (Steinbeck 124). This shows that it’s not just Ma Joad and Tom that are worried, so maybe something is wrong and they can just feel it. It also shows how strong willed Ma Joad is and how her top priority is still caring for the family, she does not have time to worry about the future.

Then there’s the gas station where the owner reveals how many people come through begging and trading for gas, demonstrating not only how many people are being pushed off the land, but also how many have no money left and are barely scraping by (Steinbeck 126).

The next big event would be the death of Grampa Joad. In hindsight, it might not have been a great idea to drug a man of his age, but I guess they did not think it would harm him, and maybe it didn’t have anything to do with his death, who knows. It also could be seen now that maybe the dog dying earlier in the chapter was foreshadowing his death, maybe not. The most important part, I think, was when Casy was talking about how he knew the old man was dying, and he explained that “Grampa didn’ die tonight. He died the minute you took ‘im off the place. Oh, he was breathin’, but he was dead. He was that place, an’ he knowed it” (Steinbeck 146). This shows how much of a connection that the farmers had with the land, that they might even die just for leaving it.

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

The Grapes of Wrath: Chapters 11 & 12

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.

The Grapes of Wrath: Chapter 10

I know it may seem like I say this quite often but this chapter is very important to the development of the story. First, the reader meets some new people; Ruthie, who is twelve years old, Winfield, who is ten years old, Rose of Sharon, who is pregnant, and Connie Rivers, Rose of Sharon’s husband. The family only ends up getting eighteen dollars for all of the things they can’t take, kind of like what the people were experiencing in chapter 9. Then there’s the whole family meeting, the preacher is invited to come along, and then they decide to leave the next morning. So they slaughter and salt the two pigs, pack, Muley shows up for a bit, and then they are ready to leave. Oh yeah, did I forget to mention, they drugged Grandpa and threw him in the back of the truck because he was planning on staying behind, classy.

Thrown into all of this chaos, was a revealing part of the story, perhaps a bit of foreshadowing you could say. One thing that I forgot to mention in my previous blogs is the time that the owners told the tenant farmers that they should go to California for work, but then they even tell the farmers that they are going to trick the farmers coming west from the east coast into buying the nutrient deprived fields (Steinbeck 33-34). It sounded like the same thing the farmers were doing, heading west for better work, but the ones telling them told other people heading west to Oklahoma lies, so it would be logical that they were being lied to about California.

Then, the subject resurfaces in chapter ten when Ma Joad starts worrying to Tom Joad about whether there will actually be a better life in California, and Joad even tells about how one of his former inmates was from California and he was telling stories about how the fruit pickers were basically slaves and there are way too many people looking for work. But they just pass it off as nothing, mostly because they don’t WANT to believe it, and also someone was handing out flyers that said they were in need of jobs (Steinbeck 91). If the flyer says so, it must be true!

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

The Grapes of Wrath: Chapter 9

Chapter nine is another one of those chapters where the focus goes off of the Joad family and to something or someone else. This time, its tenant farmers selling all of the things they can not take with them for outrageously low prices.

This is another chapter where Steinbeck emphasizes the pain and trouble the tenant farmers had to go through when they were kicked off of their farms. Now that they are convinced there will be a better life in California, they are selling all of their possessions that they can not bring with them. And of course where there is money to be made, there are going to be plenty of people to swindle honest people out of their money. They would buy things that would usually cost thirty dollars for five; just because they knew that the farmers needed money and there was no way that they could take a mule team or a bath tub with them.

The pain that the farmers are going through also shows when they start saying things like “You’re not buying only junk, you’re buying junked lives. You’re buying a little girl plaiting the forelocks, taking off her hair ribbon to make bows, standing back, head cocked, rubbing the soft noses with her cheek. You’re buying years of work, toil in the sun; you’re buying a sorrow that can’t talk. There’s a premium goes with this pile of junk and the bay horses—so beautiful—a packet of bitterness to grow in your house and to flower some day. We could have save you, but you cut us down, and soon you will be cut down and there’ll be none of us to save you” (Steinbeck 87). The people are angry at the people for making them practically giving their stuff away, and now it seems like they just now realized how important some of the things are, like how the horses are not just horses, they are all of the memories surrounding the horses.

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

The Grapes of Wrath: Chapter 8

Chapter 8 is an emotional chapter for the Joad family because it is when Tom finally makes his way home, or, where his family is. When Tom says, “I could shut my eyes an’ walk there. On’y way I can go wrong is to think about her. Jus’ forget about her, an’ I’ll go right there. Hell, man, I was born right aroun’ in here,” it shows how much of a connection the people had with the land (Steinbeck 67). The quote also reminds me of The Old Man and the Sea because Joad always seems to refer to the land as if it were a woman, just like the old man referred to the ocean as a woman, and in both stories, there is a younger generation with new tools (motorboats for the old man, and tractors for Joad) and less respect for the source of their food and income.

The story of how Joad’s Uncle John’s wife died shows how much mystery there still was in medicine at the time if you were a normal citizen, not a doctor. One night, she said her stomach hurt, and she said she needed a doctor, but Uncle John just told her to take some pain medicine and go to bed, and the next day she died. It turns out her appendix burst, but it was already too late when they found out (Steinbeck 68). Another story that shows how much different times were back then would be when Tom told the story of how when his brother Noah was born, there was no doctor there at first, so his dad panicked, and since he did not know what to do, he just started pulling Noah out, which deformed him. Luckily, the midwife came in soon enough to where she was able to “mould” Noah back to normal (Steinbeck 78).

Another thing that I noticed was at the dinner, when they asked Casy if he would do the grace, and he responded that he was no longer a preacher (again), Tom said “Aw, com on. Give [Granma] a grace. Don’t do you no harm, an’ she likes ‘em” (Steinbeck 80). I think that this shows how almost everybody used to be “Christian” because their parents were and things like grace were just embedded into their lives.

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

The Grapes of Wrath: Chapter 7

If someone reads this book and does not catch the obvious bias against banks and businesses, then they must have not read chapter seven, because that is what the whole chapter is about. At first, when it is describing all of the signs that the car lot has like “Good Used Cars. Cheap transportation, three trailers. ’27 Ford, clean, Checked cars, guaranteed cars. Free radio. Car with 100 gallons of gas free,” it sounds like this would be a nice place to buy a car, but that is what I would call, wrong (Steinbeck 61).

There are still car salesmen today, and most people do not trust them to give them a good deal, so hopefully they thought this back then too. Who knows though, they could be some of the honest, polite salesmen.

It all looks good until the main car salesman starts using phrases like “They look good for one and a quarter. Get ‘em rolling. Get ‘em out in a jalopy. Sock it to ‘em! They took our time,” then it’s obvious they are just in it to make money, even if it means screwing people out of a honest, hard earned dollar (Steinbeck 61).

These salesmen are making some serious money off of people because so many families are coming to buy cars so they can drive themselves to California, and even though they could turn some sales for a hundred dollars profit for them, they want even more. The one deal that the salesman does make in the chapter, he said that he paid $78.50 for it, so he ended up bullying the man into giving him fifty dollars up front, a contract for forty dollars, which he would pay off by ten dollars a month, and two good mules with a cart that he said he might be able to get ten dollars out of. Then, after the deal was done, it was revealed to the reader that they got the car for only thirty five dollars and the mule team could go for at least seventy five dollars (Steinbeck 64). The man ended up making one hundred and thirty dollars on one deal, which was a good chunk of money back then. Sounds like some real quality characters.

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

The Grapes of Wrath: Chapter 6

Chapter six is an important chapter because it is the first time that both Tom Joad and Jim Casy find out why there is nobody around.

It’s weird to think in today’s world of someone going back home from being in prison, and their whole family was gone and the house abandoned. Back in the time the book is though, they would have no idea unless the family sent a letter to the prison, and many people back then couldn’t or did not like to write all that much. It turns out that Tom Joad’s dad did not like to write, but “he wouldn’. Didn’t like to. It give him the shivers to write” (Steinbeck 42). That’s also very strange to think about, because in today’s world, almost everybody in the United States can write.

Later when Joad was telling the story about how one time one of the neighbors left on vacation with his whole family, and the rest of the farmers thought he moved, so they took all that they could from the house, and when the guy came back, he drove around and got all of his stuff back, except a pillow that Joad’s grandpa took, and he was not going to give it back, he said his grandpa said “If Albert wants this pilla so bad, let him come an’ get her. But he better come shootin’, ‘cause I’ll blow his goddamn stinkin’ head off if he comes messin’ aroun’ my pilla” (Steinbeck 44). This also shows how different times were then, when people settled their disputes personally, and why they sometimes turned violent.

There is nobody in the book so far that represents the fighting spirit of Americans as much as Muley Graves. He is the only one left still on the farms. He says “I’ll be aroun’ till hell freezes over. There ain’t nobody can run a guy name of Graves outa this country” (Steinbeck 45). He’s been hunting for his own food and hiding whenever the police come looking for him, like they do when they see the men’s fire. He has even knocked out the Deputy and shot out the headlights of the police car to get back at them for trying to kick him off of the land (Hemingway 58).

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