The Grapes of Wrath: Discussion I

Chapters 1-6: An ex-con, a turtle, and some serious "eat-the-rich" energy

Initial thoughts

This is some good stuff. Absolutely. After reading the beginning about the clay I thought we might be in for a slog here but Steinbeck got to the juice quick. I mean 60 pages in and we have it all: a devastating, dusty backdrop; a killer, a thirsty preacher and a ghost; an unstoppable turtle; and some “eat the rich” energy that would make AOC blush. Let’s break it down.

Chapter 1

• I generally don’t love books that start off with straight description like that but this passage worked to set the background, conditions so harsh and unforgiving that they will ultimately drive a migration, not to mention the whole story. With a normal harvest there is no leaving home, no journey.

• Though dust storms are a foreign phenomenon to many of us, natural disaster isn’t. The destruction of communities by forces of nature is just as familiar to us today, in flood waters and raging fires that wipe away home and history without second thought

• Corn appears to be a symbol that represents the livelihood of the farmers and rightfully so. It ends up settling “wearily sideway toward the earth and pointed the direction of the wind,” a victim to the drought and the wind

• The description of dust was especially evocative, how it mixed in the air and slipped through the smallest cracks to settle in the furniture

• “The corn could be gone, so long as something remained,” the children think, as their fathers take in the damage from the dust. But what is that something that remains? Hope? The men do not break, what happens when they finally do?

Chapter 2

• The truck driver was swayed by “rich bastard” argument. I was surprised to see this here, in such blunt language. I figured they were saying “wealthy bugger” or something of the sort in those days—but I guess “rich bastard” rolled off the tongue even back then. I was also just surprised by the sentiment. Growing up in a country whose parents and grandparents extolled the virtue of busting your ass, my generation is often accused of being hating hard work and hating CEOs, which we do. I guess I just never thought they were shitting on the shitting on the guy at the top back then, too, but it’s nice to know that they were.

• I appreciate how the truck driver agreeing to give Joad a ride and concluding “he was not one whom any rich bastard could kick around” is followed immediately by ,“He knew he was trapped, but he couldn’t see a way out.” Although the latter quote refers to the truck driver’s manipulation by Joad, it also aptly describes his own life’s trajectory: a lonely, monotonous life on the road in order to make ends meet.

• The trucker tells Joad he is considering taking mechanical engineering lessons. He says, “Then I won’t drive no truck. I’ll tell the other guys to drive trucks.” This is the first time we see talk of the hierarchy, the totem pole, that governs man. It appears to be worth scrutiny.

• The contrast between the trucker and Joad is made apparent with the way they deal with insects. The trucker ushers a bee into an air stream and out of the truck, while Joad crushes the skull of a grasshopper and tosses it out the window.

• The trucker comes off as aware, observant—he realizes Joad is coming from prison. But Joad is a keen observer, too, and he knew the driver knew from the moment he opened his mouth. Joad seems to move through the world smoothly, if cynically. The trucker’s idealism plays as a nice foil to Joad’s own aimlessness and disillusionment.

Chapter 3

• The turtle seems to be a symbol of freedom and purpose. He does not know where he is going but he proceeds wholeheartedly, crossing dangerous highways fearlessly.

• The juxtaposition of the two cars the turtle encounters is an interesting one. The first girl swerves so aggressively to avoid the turtle that her wheels lift off the ground. While kindhearted, her self-preservation instincts seem nonexistent: had she flipped her car or ran off the road she could have injured or killed herself, all for a turtle. On the other hand, the truck driver, who swerved to hit the turtle, is simply a piece of shit. These opposing reactions, to save or to kill, are first explored in the bee/grasshopper juxtaposition noted above. Will this dynamic show up again?

• The wild oat that gets crushed between the turtle’s shell, is carried by him, and subsequently covered in the dirt seems to attest to the resilience of life. The seed, like man, sometimes must travel long distances before finding a place where it can plant itself and once again grow, but it does eventually find that place.

Chapter 4

• I didn’t expect the preacher, Casy, to confess to getting girls hyped up on the Holy Spirit and then hooking up with them. Definitely weird, definitely not okay. And the fact that he called them “Holy vessels” without a hint of irony. My God, dude. I never was in Youth Group but come to think of it some of those dudes were absolutely trying to use God as their wingman.

• “There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do,” says Casy. Casy once felt purpose in his calling as a preacher but does no longer. The trucker clings to virtue—he doesn’t drink because he wants to be better. He is more than just the thing he does. Joad drinks, and killed a guy when he was drunk, and that was just something he did and would do again. Is there such thing as sin and virtue? Do the choices we make matter? Casy was a sinner who preached virtue. Was he correct, or was that his way of absolving himself of guilt?

• Casy professes a connection with all of humanity, with men and women, rather than with God or the Holy Spirit. He knows this universality to be true, and this spirituality of his is familiar to us all, especially those of us who have ever overindulged in an edible. But what does this humanist perspective entail in a world of the Bank, in a world where men are driven from their homes by me who were once their neighbors?

• Joad mentions to Casy the prisoner that broke parole in order to return to prison because at home there are no “[e]lectric lights…no shower baths. There ain’t no books, an’ the food’s lousy.” This functions on two levels. The first illustrates that a man in poverty can be less free than a man in prison if he has no light to live by, nothing to stimulate the mind or nourish the body. The second, shown in Joad’s agreement with the returning prisoner, is to show the flip-side of that freedom, of not knowing what to do or where to go, of being outside routine. The turtle strives for that aimless freedom, a freedom that scares Joad.

Chapter 5

• This chapter is just a heartbreaking depiction of these families being forced out of their homes

• On the owners kicking people off of their land: “Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics that drove them because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling.” What is the landlord who raises rent to increase his margins, or the Target CEO who funnels shoppers into the self-checkout line, practicing, if not mathematics? It is the perfect euphemism for profit.

• I was struck by the description of the bank as a monster, as something that exists and must be nourished. Something that, though grotesque and all-consuming, cannot be allowed to die

• The representatives also use language like The Bank to deflect from the fact that human action is what is driving them out of their homes, a choice that put profit over people. Sounds a lot like “shareholders” does today.

• One of my favorite lines so far: “It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it…Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

• “But you’ll kill the land with cotton.” “We know.” The dogma of extraction.

• The attachment to the land runs deep. The tenant makes an appeal to the representative. His Grampa killed the Indians there (bit of a blind spot), his dad killed the snakes, his kids were birthed in that very place. Their hands worked the land, their blood spilled on the soil, surely that means more than a piece of paper? “It’s not us, it’s the bank,” they respond.

• “Go to California.” Get out. Find opportunity elsewhere. Your home doesn’t belong to you anymore. We’ve seen this before.

• We witness this hierarchy again, in Joe Davis’ boy, who’s driving the tractor over his former neighbor’s land. Although still low on the totem pole, he is now complicit in the destruction of what was once his community. Joe is depicted as alien, otherworldly, as he eats his sandwich in front of the hungry children whose homes he is razing. In his gloves and goggles he is “part of the monster, a robot in the seat”, separated wholly from his fellow humans and neighbors.

• Joe Davis responds adamantly to accusations that he betrayed his community, a self-preservation instinct that we’ve already seen amongst other characters. It’s $3 a day, he says, and he was tired of his family being hungry. “Can’t worry about anybody’s kids but your own.” This is a familiar sentiment expressed in our for anyone who lived in the US in the lead-up to the election and the concerns about cost-of-living an d groceries we all experienced. It’s valid, of course, but is it wholly right? Is it the best solution? Does it justify the man turning his back on his community instead of standing with them? He is okay, but a hundred families are in ruins. Is that justified?

• Violence is explored as recourse for the man who has lost everything, but even that is rendered neutral by careful and calculated language. It’s beyond the control of men, what’s happening. It’s the Monster. It’s a force of nature. It’s not a man, making a decision. It’s the free market.

• “One man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen families.” Another incredibly relevant detail to today—especially in the age of AI. Technology leads to progress, but progress can lead to displacement and disenfranchisement. How do we protect the workers left behind by new technology?

Chapter 6

• The image of the Joads’ abandoned and toppled house is a powerful image. It personalizes the destruction narrated in the previous chapter by connecting it directly to Tom, and hurts even more considering that he thought he was returning to his old familiar home after 4 years in prison

• Muley, “the graveyard ghost,” is the personification of the destroyed communities. He stays behind, lurking in the shadows, living in rags, eating rabbit, after his wife and kids departed west. His insistence on staying in a wasteland and not accompanying his family is twisted—but understandable. Can you blame him? He lost his virginity on that land, his children were born there, his dad was mauled by a boar, for crying out loud. And to the bank it is just a plot of land, soon to be sucked dry.

• When Muley convinces Joad to hide from the deputy sheriff instead of confronting him, he tells him, “You can tell yourself that you’re fooling them.” Joad's pride wouldn’t let him hide, but Muley’s advice touches upon a message that seems to be recurring: the narratives we tell ourselves matter.

• Muley describes an encounter similar to that in chapter 5 when Willy Feely, one of his neighbors, comes by with the tractor. He gives the same excuse: he’s got mouths to feed, what happens to others is up to them. Muley says he “seems like he’s shamed, so he gets mad.” Is looking out for one’s own family, dismissing the misfortune of others as simply something they didn’t work hard enough to avoid, shameful? Steinbeck seems to think it is. Fucking Communist.

• “Fells gets used to a place, it’s hard to go,” Muley says this, and it applies to basically every character we’ve met thus far—not just to him but the truck driver, the prisoner who returned, Joad, and the countless families now forced off their land, forced to go west. Everybody but the turtle.

• “What I mean, if a fella’s got somepin to eat an another fella’s hungry, why, the first fella ain’t got no choice,” Muley says about sharing the rabbit with Joad and Casy. That is hard not to view as a larger commentary on man’s duty to his neighbor, one contrasted by the image a great, steel, unflinching tractor crumbling a family’s generational home.

Well, holy shit. I had the notes but turning it into something cohesive was a different beast. I was going to do a concluding paragraph but I’m about to fall asleep at my desk so I’m just going to publish it as is for now. I hope these notes provide some insight. I think I touched upon some good stuff but there was no doubt a lot that I missed so that’s where you come in.

The Great American Book Club is all about your participation so please in the comments talk about anything you want to. You’re welcome to respond to any of my points and also share your own. I went heavy on theme but character, plot, and all that is fair game. Discussion is always the main goal here. We will continue to refine the process and develop the system over time.

I wrote in the intro email that I will publish Sunday and Wednesday but I think I am going to try to do Sunday and Thursday instead and see how that works. The reading assignment for Thursday, 2/6, will be chapters 7-14.

Thanks everybody so much for participating. We all deserve to spend more time with good books, and I hope you will continue on this journey with me. I’ll see you in the comments, and I’ll see you Thursday.