Study Guide to The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645422815
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which was the best selling book in 1939 and won the National Book Award. As a 1939 American realist novel, The Grapes of Wrath follows a struggling family on their search for work, success, and safety during the Great Depression. Moreover, Steinbeck discusses social philosophy by weaving in themes such as family, betrayal, and change. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Steinbeck’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO JOHN STEINBECK

The fact that the works of John Steinbeck have sold enormously and continuously has harmed rather than helped his critical reputation. Steinbeck’s own avoidance of publicity and his refusal to play any sort of literary “role” has contributed to the notion that he is merely a popular writer and therefore unworthy of “serious” attention. John Steinbeck, however, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962 (long after many critics had decided that his productive career was finished), has never written for critical applause. Involving himself completely in the problems of his nation and his people, Steinbeck has always insisted that the first job of a man-with-a-typewriter is to get his work read. American readers (not to mention reading audiences throughout the world) have agreed with him.

This is not to say, however, that Steinbeck’s popularity (or the popularity of any great writer) is always a good thing. Neither audiences nor books can be judged by quantity alone; it is the quality of the audience and the quality of the books which determine the real communication between a writer and his public. And if the work of John Steinbeck has often been depreciated without justice, it has often been praised without perception.

Enthusiasm for Steinbeck as a “social historian,” for example, is very widespread and very superficial. Misled by the fact that Steinbeck has always been profoundly aware of the political, economic, and moral forces at work in the American culture; pointing to the fact that he has written many motion-picture scripts in addition to documentary films and articles for national magazines, reviewers have tended to promulgate the image of Steinbeck as a writer whose chief value is that of journalism: a social commentator who has, an occasion, presented his message in the form of fiction. Nothing could be more untrue to the facts of the writer’s life and the aesthetic complexity of his art.

Like two other great American writers who were Nobel Prize winners-William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway-Steinbeck is often read for the wrong reasons. Beneath the “hardboiled” and understated surface of Hemingway’s books, for example, there is a lyric statement of the universal human condition; over and above the hunting, fishing, and adventuring, there is a profound treatment of isolation and ultimate defeat. And within Faulkner’s sensationalism there is a morality-play of man’s destiny: his necessary Fall and his hope for redemption. By the same token, one cannot read the works of Steinbeck as though they were mere social histories (sometimes “heavy” and sometimes “light”); to do so would make no more sense than to read Hemingway as though he were offering nothing more than an outdoor guide, or to read Faulkner as though he were collecting case studies.

STEINBECK’S USE OF SYMBOLISM AND ALLEGORY

The major books of John Steinbeck, despite the “easy” surface of the narratives, cannot be read as though the surface itself were the total substance of the fiction. A book like Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, for example, is “easy” reading indeed, but the full richness of the book depends on the reader’s willingness and ability to work through, rather than on the most obvious level of narrative. This also is true of a larger effort such as Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Both books, to be sure, are “about fishing on the one hand, and displaced farmers on the other, but neither book can be defined in any such way. For Steinbeck, like Hemingway, takes the particular action or actions of his story and so manipulates their elements that the result is a statement of human truth which goes far beyond the particular actions themselves. The method, as in all literary art, is essentially symbolic or analogic: that is, a method which uses the extremely limited “story” to trigger a series of chain reactions pointing to universal truths.

In Cannery Row, for example, Steinbeck gives us a hint as to the manner in which he regards the language of literature: “The Word is a symbol and a delight which sucks up men and scenes, trees, plants, factories, and Pekinese. Then the Thing becomes the Word and back to Thing again, but warped and woven into a fantastic pattern.”

The “pattern,” it should be noted, is “fantastic” - that is, an imaginative perception, a re-creation; it is not simply an echo or photograph of any one level of reality. The artist must “warp” and “weave” reality itself, and in order to do this he will use a multiplicity of instruments. He may incorporate into his “story” allusions to religious or philosophical systems, ideas, characters; he may select actions which themselves hint of universal archetypes or dramas; he may use objects whose qualities will force a reader to make associations (either emotional or intellectual) that comment directly upon, or in some way help explain, the central action itself. He may even interrupt the central flow of his narrative with apparently unrelated digressions-digressions, however, unrelated only on the surface.

The Grapes of Wrath, for example, undoubtedly Steinbeck’s most important work, and indeed one of the most important works in American literature, is far too often read simply as a social documentary dealing with a regional problem: the “Dust-Bowl” of the 1930s, the displacement of tenant farmers by a totally indifferent (rather than cruel) economic machine, and the subsequent trek of the “Oakies” to California, where they were victimized by unscrupulous agricultural interests. But the narrative itself cannot be read apart from the biblical allusions permeating it. It is the great mythic structure of the Judeo-Christian tradition (the story of Israel, bondage in Egypt, journey to the Promised Land, Redemption through Suffering), and the moral code intrinsic to this tradition, which lies at the very center of the narrative itself.

Within this allegorical structure, furthermore, there are other levels of reference: to the transcendentalist ethic of American moralists such as Emerson; to the naturalist assumptions of race power-and-instinct which developed from Darwinism (and the social application of these assumptions to patterns of economic failure or survival). There is, in short, an entire complex of references to religion, to “non-teleological” naturalist philosophy, to myth and symbol which begin with, but go far beyond, the problems of the “Oakies” themselves.

STEINBECK’S TECHNIQUES OF FICTION

Even the narrative progression may be broken when it suits the artist’s purpose to do so: hence the “land turtle” chapters in The Grapes of Wrath and the lyrical “interchapters” as well might seem to have nothing to do with the main “story,” but actually they serve as a sort of metaphorical reinforcement of those qualities driving the Joad family onward despite all adversity, ultimately providing at least the hope for eventual triumph. Steinbeck, in short, so often dismissed (or praised) as a “social historian,” actually uses a wide variety of symbolic and linguistic instruments to get at the full reality he wishes to communicate. Far from employing “documentary” prose, he utilizes a whole spectrum of techniques: allegorical counterpoint, poetic prose, cinematic description (the use of prose as a camera), dramatic dialog, and symbolic reference.

The result of these various methods must be considered an orchestration rather than a simple recording. Steinbeck, again, begins with a regional problem-but renders it universal; he examines partisan conflicts from the standpoint of their human, rather than partisan, elements. To cite another parallel: Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is not really “about” the Spanish Civil War; it uses the war - and all its political and ideological ambiguities-to dramatize a reality that is far more “real” than the particular actions and individuals involved. So too does The Grapes of Wrath dramatize those elements, in a particular situation, which themselves are universal; elements which, as Warren French points out, are “typical of recurrent patterns of human behavior.”

“Reality” itself, furthermore, is complex rather than simple; American writers, especially since the turn of the century, have come to distrust the mere surface of life, no matter how accurately described. It is what lies beneath (or above) the surface that fascinates the literary artist. And in order to pierce through mere surface, a writer may use one or more basic techniques: he may concentrate on psychological analysis (the method of Henry James); he may examine the stream of consciousness itself (as Faulkner did in The Sound and the Fury); he may concentrate on those areas where action itself creates emotion, without the need for rhetoric (the essential preoccupation of Ernest Hemingway). And he may choose to deal with human beings who are either involved in some vital struggle, or who are alienated from that level of material prosperity which often obscures rather than reveals spiritual reality. Such is the essential method of John Steinbeck.

ALIENATION AND STRUGGLE

The alienated individuals, in short, have less “surface” to distract them (and us, as readers), while the struggle itself reveals human motivations and drives too often hidden beneath the polite verbalisms of polite society. If Steinbeck often chooses to write of alienation and struggle, he does so not because he is preoccupied with “politics” but because he is preoccupied with human dignity and human reality. It is for this reason that he deals with alienation (the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, the boys of the Palace Flop-house in Cannery Row); with struggle (the labor conflict of In Dubious Battle, the tragic loneliness and violence in Of Mice and Men); or the attempt of the individual human being to resist an environment which threatens to destroy human ethics, pride, and dignity (the essential conflict of The Winter of Our Discontent). And one of his most recent books (Travels with Charlie) represents an attempt to rediscover the meaning of humanity, of selfhood, and of the American Dream.

Like Huckleberry Finn, Steinbeck often refuses to be “sivilized” and takes to traveling; and like Huckleberry Finn, this most sensitive and morally aware of writers is too often criticized for what he resists rather than loved for what he affirms. It is important to remember that Steinbeck cannot be defined as a social critic; nor can he be defined as a “documentary” or “political” writer. One might almost say, indeed, that for John Steinbeck, the only true “politics” are the politics of the human heart.

BIOGRAPHY

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902, a descendant of old settlers. California itself - “El Dorado,” the Golden Country-has occupied a central position in his work. The epic power and sweep of the American continent, and the machine-waste or abuse of this power (potential vs. product), is a basic theme in Steinbeck’s writing, as it has been (especially since the Civil War) for many other American novelists.

Steinbeck’s family was middle-class. His father, John Ernst, was a prosperous miller and County official. His mother, Olive Hamilton, taught school at various locations in California. As a boy Steinbeck was a reader rather than a scholar; resenting academic discipline, he nevertheless loved outdoor life. Despite his life-long distrust (like Hemingway’s) of “literary types” as such, Steinbeck as a youth read widely and avidly: As both Warren French and Peter Lisca indicate, such writers as Dostoevsky, Milton, Flaubert, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Malory (the Morte d’Arthur) - all had a profound effect on his mind and imagination. And perhaps the most powerful shaping force on Steinbeck as an artist was not (as some critics later seemed to imply) Darwin or Marx, but the King James version of The Bible, to which Steinbeck himself has repeatedly pointed as the greatest influence on his work.

Although he wrote for the student newspapers both at Salinas and at Stanford University, and although his reading background was both varied and intense, Steinbeck could not adjust to the disciplines necessary for a college degree, and never graduated. He did attend college sporadically for five years during the 1920s, but also worked on ranches, labored on road-gangs, assisted in the laboratory of a sugar-beet factory, and held a variety of other jobs.

Steinbeck came to New York City in 1925, but the big town was somewhat less than overjoyed at his arrival. He did some construction work (helping to build Madison Square Garden) and some newspapering, but refused to compromise his determination to support himself by creative work. When a woman friend, with feminine practicality, suggested that he go into advertising (only until he became “successful,” of course,) Steinbeck recognized the danger signs. He said “get thee behind me, Satan” to Madison Avenue. He completed a volume of short stories; and-when this book was rejected-headed back across the continent, this time to the Sierra Mountains near Lake Tahoe. There, supporting himself as the caretaker of a lodge, surrounded with some of the finest country in the world, far from the glass-and-concrete world of Manhattan, John Steinbeck began work as a novelist.

STEINBECK’S EARLY CAREER

The literary world, however, did not burst into hallelujahs. Several manuscripts were rejected, and Steinbeck-with that streak of stubbornness no less a part of artistic success than any degree of genius-looked at the mountains and kept on writing. Finally, his first book was published. It was a rather lush historical novel called Cup of Gold. And even now the Gods who preside over literary success seemed determined to keep a young man named John Steinbeck in the obscurity of his mountain lodge. For the book appeared in 1929, the year of the Big Crash. It was a time of breadlines and broken hopes, when all the visions of bank accounts in every garden vanished to the dirge of ticker tapes. It was a time when a historical novel by an unknown novelist could not be expected to achieve much success. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that few reviewers took the book seriously. What is surprising, however, is the fact that the book sold 1,533 copies on first printing, despite widespread economic panic and a shrug from the reviewers.

Bad luck continued to dog Steinbeck’s literary career for a time. After several attempts to get another novel going, he completed Pastures of Heaven in 1932, only to be denied the pastures of print when the first two publishing houses to contract the book went bankrupt. When the novel finally did appear, it moved slowly.

Meanwhile, Steinbeck had come down off his mountain to elope with Carol Henning, a girl from San Jose, and the couple settled in Pacific Grove-a conservative, overwhelmingly Methodist community that the writer was to remember with acerbity later in his career. The young Steinbecks were supported by the $25 per month assistance of the elder Steinbeck. (Many readers of this study will fail to remember a time when it was possible for two people to live on little more than $25 per month; it should be kept in mind, however, that in 1932 many a big-city secretary was earning the same wage for a full-time job.) It was at Pacific Grove that Steinbeck was to meet a lifelong friend, Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist and real-life model for the character of “Doc” in Cannery Row.

After a brief stay in Los Angeles, the Steinbecks returned to Monterey county, and in 1933 To a God Unknown appeared. This novel, a rather dark and brooding tale, is enjoying a modest rebirth as a paperback; at the time of its original publication, however, the book resulted in financial loss for its publisher, who promptly went bankrupt. Once again Steinbeck found himself without a publisher. The success of several short stories, however, including “The Red Pony” in 1933, and the selection of “The Murder” for the O. Henry Prize in 1934, indicated that the tide was at last turning in Steinbeck’s favor.

Not until the appearance of Tortilla Flat in 1934, however, did Steinbeck’s creative work pay cash dividends. It was with this novel, a playful and ironic romp with a cast drawn from some Monterey paisanos whom the author ha...