Blog #24: The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck uses many different techniques to keep the readers engaged and entertained until finishing the whole book. I think that the two most commonly used tools used in this book to keep the novel entertaining were suspense and mystery. I thought that the use of the small descriptive chapters that did not include the story's main characters was another strong literary technique to keep the readers hooked. Those small chapters really seemed to help explain society's situation and also the conditions that the people of the 1930's were dealing with. I personally think that this strategy was a good one because the readers were completely able to understand the non-fiction parts of this book. I always have a problem with reading historical fiction books because I think that I have a hard time deciding which parts of the novel are fiction and which parts of the novel are non-fiction. In this book though I did not have that problem because the author made it really obvious to the readers. I noticed that the book used a lot of suspense combined with mystery. I think that throughout the whole book suspense was building because the reader was hoping inside that the Joad family would be able to find a sufficient home in California and be able to live a less stressful life and live out their dreams. I noticed the mystery and suspense building in chapter five. "They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses." (Steinbeck 33) I think that this quote was an eye opener to me. I guess I never expected that they would begin to plow over peoples' houses to clear the farmers off the land. I think that they should have probably given the farmers some leeway because they had no control over the weather situation what so ever. By using a controversial topic for the book I think that the author made a good decision to use mystery and suspense to keep the readers hooked.

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