Imagine: it is 1892 and you are a factory worker for Carnegie Steel Company. You spend your days in assembly lines, tired, sweaty and underpaid. You work all day, yet when you get home, you cannot afford to feed your family. With the wages you are paid, economic prosperity is out of your reach. You have heard that a local steel union is organizing a strike to campaign for higher wages, but you know that as soon as you walk out the door, ten others will walk in to take your job. You are hopeless. Flash forward to 1930, now you are small farmer, but the same issues still plague you. After being forced from your home you flee to the west coast in hopes of a modern promised land, but find only oppression and squalor. This is the setting of John …show more content…
He accomplishes this feat through three main avenues, the first of which is to personalize only those characters who further his message. In The Grapes of Wrath, this group is composed of the impoverished migrants and a small, sympathetic faction of the owner class. There are thirty-one strictly named characters in the novel, twenty-seven of whom are migrants. Muley Graves, Willy Feeley, Mr. Thomas and Jim Rawley are the only four of this group to be part of the owner class and represent only thirteen percent of all named characters. By naming his characters, Steinbeck humanizes them and makes them relatable, while the rest of the people in the novel remain an ambiguous mass. Readers more readily connect with a relatable character, and by choosing to name only certain characters, Steinbeck controls which characters the reader sympathizes with. Steinbeck’s second approach to creating emotional attachments is to justify any questionable actions that his named characters take. It is interesting that although nearly every character in the book commits some type of social faux pas, Steinbeck only goes to the trouble of fully justifying the actions of characters the reader is intended to sympathize with. There are vague attempts at providing context for the opposition, such as in chapter three, where he depicts the “Owner Man” …show more content…
Although the intercalary chapters address a variety of issues, an overwhelming majority of them are used to either attack capitalism, or to venerate the pseudo-socialist organization of the migrants. There are sixteen intercalary chapters in the book, three fourths of which either directly or indirectly critique capitalism. Where the plot chapters vaguely question the circumstances of the characters, the criticism presented in these chapters does not compare to the unabridged message presented in the intercalary chapters. For instance, in chapter twenty-five Steinbeck clearly unveils his anti-capitalism sentiment when he writes, “Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system where by their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs […] like a great sorrow” (Steinbeck 348). Although Steinbeck’s criticisms in these chapters are fairly aggressive, what is interesting to note is the lack of people surrounding these issues. This is not to say that there are no people in his chapters, only that the characters in them remain ambiguous. By neglecting to involve defined characters, Steinbeck distances the reader from those who contribute to the conflict, making the system much easier to criticize. The depersonalization that results from the intercalary chapters’ structure allows Steinbeck to