Theme of The Grapes of Wrath

Theme of The Grapes of Wrath

Daniel Marino ASEH
11/06/02 Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath, by John Stienbeck, is a book that teaches to look at life in a different perspective and keep in mind that everything is not as it seems. It tells us that the good we see in something may be a hallucination, and is bad instead. This book also teaches another lesson: the famous maxim, “look before you leap”. This lesson is very important because we never now what awaits us in a new place. Sometimes we may be given an idea by rumors or tales but these are most likely fables that others or the mind invents and they may have no truth to them. Because of us not knowing what lies before us we must always proceed with caution. However, these two lessons are beaten out by a stronger one, the idea that families should always be together and the members should do anything for another. Not only should the direct family members help each other but also they ought to help everyone else who needs it, and treat everyone as if they were family. This is how Stienbeck believes people ought to be. This is important because without their families, many people would not have made it to California, also falsely known as the Promised Land.
The Grapes of Wrath takes place in the 1930 and is about the Dust Bowl, which is a time in which many people had to leave the land, which they loved so dearly and move to a strange foreign place. This story, in particular, is one about a fictional family, the Joads, who are being affected horribly by the Dust Bowl. They are like the many other families at that time: once very happy and proud of who they were, and then sad and angered by the big landowners who had kicked them off their land. The plot is about the Joads experiencing their many hardships as they moved from Oklahoma to California. The story begins with Tom Joad, who killed a man in a fight that he himself didn’t start, getting out of prison. When he arrives home his family decides to...