Grapes Of Wrath Family Analysis

Family, Home, and Community in The Grapes of Wrath In the novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, a major theme is that of changing home, family, and community. Throughout the book, the characters' experiences change their views on the varying importance of these things. From the very first chapter to the last, the importance of family is emphasized even as the concept of family changes. The meaning of home also changes over the course of the story. The characters go from viewing home as a location, to viewing it as the people they love. With home and family comes community. Along with the changing of their lives, the people around them change as well. As their community changes, those who are part of it grow closer to becoming family. The

“In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream” (Steinbeck 193). Like the Joads and Wilsons, the migrant community has disregarded the traditional biological family in favor of taking care of themselves and others as a whole. Rather than one lone family struggling to survive, they have become one family with limited but adequate resources. With this merging of family and community, all parties involved have something to gain. Home changes along with family and community throughout the book. For example, the migrant communities and families go from having no home at all to having a home anywhere along the road as long as they are together, "Every night relationships that make a world, established; and every morning the world torn down like a circus"(Steinbeck 194). They used their community's sense of fellowship and family to make a new home anywhere they went. As long as they were surrounded by their now-larger family, the people of the migrant community would always have a