John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is a classic American novel that shows the difficulties migrant workers had to go through during the Great Depression. The novel’s intercalary chapters use setting, syntax and other literary elements to depict the hardships that migrant families went through and to create a tone of despair in the story.
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By using both syntax and diction, Steinbeck develops a tone of despair in the Intercalary Chapter 25 of the grapes of wrath. This chapter takes place in a dry, desolate land in the midst of drought, Steinbeck describes the terrain as "gray mountains and brown mountains, dry and rocky, rising toward each other until they caught the yellow daylight" (Steinbeck, 2006, p. 325). Using diction Steinbeck creates a tone of despair by describing the uninhabitable terrain and conditions that the migrant workers must endure in order to survive. Steinbeck builds onto
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Namely, a chapter called route 66. Figurative language such as diction is used to highlight how little the migrants truly had, this chapter exposes imbalances of society. For instance in this chapter it says (in reference to the migrants) “And the good earth that had borne them, strengthened them, was their only possession. For a man who had nothing, possessing nothing was difficult too.” This sentence uses figurative language to develop the idea that even holding on to nothing was hard for the migrant workers. Steinbeck used this quote to allow the reader to visualize how indescribably difficult the migrant workers struggles are, to the point where they can barely hold on to nothing. This effect would not be possible without the use of the intercalary chapter to assist the reader in getting a deeper understanding of migrant