Unlike the intercalary chapters such as Chapter Seven of
The Grapes of Wrath that serves much like the camera's-eye view of
the used car salesmen and how they exploited the dispossessed Oklahoma farmers, Chapter
Five presents a broad view of the economic problem of the 1930s in America. In the Dust
Bowl representatives of the banks come to tell the farmers that they can no longer
sharecrop the land. The distance and coldness of the large banks is suggested as the
representatives merely reply, "I'm sorry" when the sharecroppers claim that their
families have lived on the land for generations and they have some
entitlement.
When the bulldozers arrive, they are as
animate creatures on their own as the driver becomes subsumed in their identity. Given
anthropomorphic qualities, the "snub-nosed monsters," described systematically destroy
all the human elements in their paths:
They ignored hills and gulches, water course,
fences, houses.
The man sitting in the iron seat did not
look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of
the monster, a robot in the seat. The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the
country, became one with the air and the earth, so that earth and air muttered in
sympatheitic vibration.
Thus,
the tractor, part of a new way of life, is inanimate and the inhumanity of the banks
underscores the great loss when people are removed from the land on which they have
lived for generations. This disenfranchisement portrayed metaphorically in Chapter Five
makes the chapter illustrative of themes of Steinbeck's narrative, and
therefore, expressive of the entire novel, rather than a microcosm, or encapsuled
expression of a smaller idea.
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