Analysis: The Grapes Of Wrath

Erika Cole

Professor Miranda

AP English Language and Composition

31 March 2023

Major Essay #2: Banking on California

In The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Chapter 5, prominent American writer and social commentator John Steinbeck criticizes the treatment of Midwestern farmers with ancestral, physical, and mental connections to the land who are dehumanized and forced off their land by “the Bank” which has no empathy or emotional connection to the land. Steinbeck employs intercalary chapters, parataxis, personification, and repetition to contrast the farmers, who are losing their ancestral land and lifeblood to the Bank, which is growing rich from raping the land, exposing the effects of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl on farmers turned migrant workers.

He calls the Banks “monsters,” living beings that “breathe profits” and “eat the interest;” they are alive yet lack key aspects that distinguish humanity from other living beings – emotion and empathy. Steinbeck uses this powerful literary tool to invoke all five senses, enraging the reader. He paints a vivid picture explaining that the monster must always grow to survive – “when the monster stops growing, it dies” – so it takes land at the cost of millions of powerless farmers. Thus, the Bank, like a monster, is hated and feared by everyone. It is unstoppable – too big and too strong to conquer. At the same time as personifying the Bank, Steinbeck illustrates how farmers are dehumanized. Most farmers are treated like stray animals – reduced to living on the road, barely surviving off the meager income available in California. Other farmers are dehumanized and used like pawns to take the land from the remaining farmers; they lose their emotions and empathy for the other farmers and work as machines, only to make money so their families can survive while other families are forced off the land. Steinbeck contrasts living versus nonliving and lack of emotion versus emotion in a paradoxical twist of personification to contrast the Bank and the farmers, thereby accentuating the injustices conferred on the

They say there is nothing to do because although the Bank is a living monster that must take the land to survive, “the bank isn’t like a man.” They say that although the bank was created by men, “they cannot control it” and “every man in a bank hates what the bank does…the bank is something more than men.” The owners defend the banks yet also hate what the banks are doing, but they have no choice because they must keep their jobs during the Great Depression. The farmers repeat that they have a moral right to the land because their people killed for it, lived on it, were born on it, and died on it. The farmers’ moral pleas will never overpower the law because they are “stealing if [they] try to stay.” Steinbeck’s repetitive diction represents the mechanical work of the Banks to clear the land farmer after farmer and to plow the land with tractors row after row, “raping [the land] methodically” of whatever nutrients are