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The Struggle In John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath

939 Words4 Pages

Frederick Douglass said, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.¨ John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath in 1939. In his novel, Steinbeck talks about the people’s journey and experiences when they are forced to leave Oklahoma and leave behind all of their possessions and memories. They were being forced to move during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. He writes the novel from the Okies point of view, so the story talks about the struggle they were going through and the amount of hate they were receiving from the Californians. The main family in the novel, the Joads, went through a lot. They lost many people, and were forced to live a poor lifestyle because they couldn't find work. In the end, Tom Joad decides to leave his family …show more content…

Ín chapter 5 of The Grapes of Wrath, it says, “The tenant system won’t work anymore. One man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen families. Pay him the wage and take all the crop…”.(33) During the time of the Great Depression employers were trying to find the most economical way to plow their crops. In a video we watched called Last Stop Before the Border it talks about how immigrants went through all this trouble to come to America and then when they got here it was still a struggle for them and they normally couldn’t find work, just how the Joads could not and many immigrants during the dust bowl or during the Great Depression. In chapter 5 it also says, “We can’t depend on it. The bank- the monster- has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size¨.(32) During this time in the 1930s people tried to get their money from the bank and the bank did not have it. This left many people poor which meant that they couldn’t even afford to feed their families so they had to migrate to find work and to get shelter and food for their families. In the end, many families needed money and resources and did whatever they needed to get

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