Blog #18: The Grapes of Wrath

I believe that the book The Grapes of Wrath reveals many things about the author, John Steinbeck. I think that the way he has the novel set up is really good. I like the fact that he tells the story of the Joad family's journey of travel to California, but he also highlights the reality of the conditions. I think that the style that he chose to use was a very good choice for this story line and I think that it made the book much more interesting because I felt like I could actually understand the conditions and the struggles of the Joad family. I noticed that in the very first chapter I kind of thought that it seem to resemble the style of the Bible. I noticed that the style of the shorter descriptive chapters used a great deal of poetic language and style. This reveals that the author really wanted the reader to get the picture, but often used short symbolic stories throughout those most often odd numbered descriptive chapters. The chapters about the Joad family's travels are mostly the even numbered chapters, and they seemed to be more realistic representations of the family's situation and the conditions they were facing. I believe that the author has written this selection from the point of an anonymous narrator. The narrator seems to be all-knowing though, and I think that the author's chosen narrator is very sympathetic to the migrants, workers, and also the poor. The narrator seems to simply state the facts about the Joad family, but they seem to dance around the point in the more descriptive chapters in the novel. I had noticed that the narrator was pretty much straight to the point when they were talking about the journey, but they did not want to totally shock anyone with the reality of the conditions so they most often used symbolism or other literary elements to get he point across with the harshness of the conditions.

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. NY: Penguin, 1939. Print.