The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath

Essay #1

In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck describes the community and economic struggle of normal Americans determined to defend their people. It captures the desperation and pain of the Great Depression. For example in chapter five we see the Great Depression emerge within the struggles of ownership of land with tenant farming, the effect it has on the country and the Joads as a whole, and the relationship to the American dream.

The struggle of ownership and land with tenant farming, in chapter five it describes the battle and hunger between wealth and poverty, the survival of life and facelessness and namelessness. The hunger to live life for the tenants is a struggle. The tenants seem to have no respect, they are treated poorly and their land, which they have no say to keep, is demolished in front of them. The tenants live life by eating and paying taxes until crops go bad and they have to borrow from the banks. The monsters hunger for life is on profit, they live life by breathing profit, they eat interest on money and if they don’t get it they die (P.43ch5). The