Saturday, February 7, 2015

How is Chapter 5, a macrocosm chapter, divided into three sections? John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath

 In this intercalary chapter, Steinbeck portrays the
inhumanity of the capitalist system. 


1. The owners of the
land in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s or their spokesmen drive out to the
tenant farms.  There they sometimes put augurs in the ground to test how much of the
topsoil has been lost.  They, then, tell the tenants that the Bank--or the Company, as
though it were a entity of its own--cannot survive without profit.  Now, the day of the
tenant farmer is over: "One man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen
families.  Therefore, the tenants must vacate the land.  The spokesmen or owners, who
sit in their cars and tell the farmers these facts blame the bank, "the monster," that
men cannot control, for this turn of events.


2. The
tractors come and make neat rows in the earth in order to plant cotton, which will strip
the land of its last remaining nutrients.  The tractor man does not love the land
anymore than does the bank.  The crop that will come up will not be one that a man has
touched, or prayed over. At noon, the tractor stops and a man with goggles and a rubber
mask lifts them from his face so he can eat a sandwich.  Children from the house on this
land come out, eating only fried dough watch his Spam sandwich as the man lifts it to
his mouth.  The tenant farmer comes out and talks to the driver, having recognized
him. 



 "Why,
you're Joe Davis's boy!...what you doing this kind of work for--against your own
people?"



3. The driver
explains that he has to feed his family, and he cannot worry about anyone else. The
tenant "ponders" on how owning property, how is he is somehow bigger for it.  But if he
does not see it, or get his hands in it, or walk on it, then the property becomes
stronger than the man, who becomes small. "Only his possessions are big--and he's the
servant of his property."  Unfortunately, these words of the tenant mean nothing to the
driver concerned only about his three dollars a day.  Dispassionately, he states that he
will have to keep the rows straight, even if it means going through the tenant's
dooryard.  When the tenant threatens to shoot him, the driver replies that the tenant
farmer will be hanged and he will have shot the wrong man, anyway.  Besides, maybe there
is no one to shoot; perhaps the "property's doing it."  Then, the driver resumes work,
and tractor cuts back and forth until the house falls. The tenant man stares after the
tractor with his rifle in his hand, and his family, too, stares after
it.

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