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At first sight a harsh tale of loss and despair. At the end, a poignant epic of human courage and hope. It is easy to see why Steinbeck had been called a communist at the time of publishing.
SPOILER ALERT
Steinbeck explores every facet of human emotions ranging from despair to courage in the face of impossible odds. The Joad family, like countless other sharecropper, lose their Oklahoma cotton farm and are forced off the land by the Bank after being unable to repay their loans during the Great Depression years. Drought, coupled with mechanization of agriculture make the Joads hardwork obsolete and they have to move away from the land that their forefathers had secured through blood and sweat.
Scraping together enough money to buy a second hand truck, the family of twelve head for Californias Central Valley in search of livelihood, taking along an eccentric friend the preacher, Jim Casey.
Steinbeck paints each character with a different brand of
hope and aspiration, courage and skill, guilt and despair. The youngest of the family, Ruthie and Winfield, who grow mature with the fatigue of the journey. The oldest, Grampa and Granma, succumb to the sorrow of separation from the land they love. Noah, the eldest of the sons, cannot find the courage to face a new world. Tom and Al, the other two older sons, with young mens strength, ambitions and modern skills, drive the familys truck as well as the familys courage all the way to California. Their mother, a pillar of strength, fights her own fears every step of the way. The elder daughter of the family, Rose of Sharon, and her young husband Connie face the move with unrealistic dreams. One of them is unable to face the harsh realities of the world and runs away. The other triumphs at the end. The father of are family, Old Tom and his brother Uncle John, are baffled by the changes in their circumstances, and manage to cope only by leaning heavily on the others for courage and emotional support. The preacher, Jim Casey, with all his intellect and compassion, finds his training and his skills provide no answer to the mysteries of human cruelty and human kindness that he encounters on the journey.
Steinbeck intersperses each chapter on the Joad family with a chapter on the general hardships and difficult conditions, causes and effects and the strength and sudden kindness of migrant life. In a way, through these chapters the reader can anticipate the coming disappointments in the path of the Joads before it actually happens. Without these chapters, the reading experience would have been too caught up in the emotions of the Joads alone, and the reader would perhaps have not been able to see the bigger cycle of universal cruelty and kindness that binds mankind together.
On reaching their destination, the Joad family falls victim to the widespread economic hardships. With money gone, and no work available, with their temporary slum shelters burnt at night by the state administrators henchmen, the Joads make their way to a government camp and are treated with dignity and respect for a short time. All too soon they have to move on in search of work, and for the first time they face strikers. Unwittingly they help in breaking the strike, merely through being willing to work to stave off starvation. Tom Joad, unable to bear the cruelty of the capitalists, leaves the family to join the strikers. Soon, the family must be back on the road once more, facing the demons of poverty, illness, starvation and lack of dignity that is the lot of migrant workers of the time.
Any attempt by the reader to evaluate a novel written by a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature must, by definition, fall short of its goal. Suffice it to say that Steinbecks masterpiece takes hold of the readers emotions from the first chapter, and doesnt let go till long after the last chapter is finished and forgotten.
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