I’m totally with Heidi….. I don’t want to finish this book. It does seem to be a million pages, one great agony after another. This is my second time reading it and I will finish it but it is agonizing. I have such a feeling of dread.
I will come out and say that I do like The Grapes of Wrath better than East of Eden. (ducks) I do find it interesting though that when I think about this novel, I remember the Joad family’s story and tend to forget about the in-between chapters. Some of them are very “on the nose” but I have more patience with them. Then again, I love Dickens despite his foibles. This might be evidence that Steinbeck is the American Dickens because I like them both.
This was a quote I shared on Goodreads as a status update for my reading progress. It made me reflect on how immigrants are being viewed/treated currently in our country.
I agree with Sean about certain people having more opportunities to do social good and not doing it. I think overall it goes back to the evil of greed motivated by fear. A lot of what the “Okies” are experiencing in this story can relate to the way the immigrants are being viewed/treated in our current environment.
I enjoy the interstitial chapters, it's giving the zoomed our view of the current environment the Joads are living in/experiencing. I still have the clear visual of that darn turtle adventuring along in my mind too! 🐢
I agree with the comment above that the poor characters having attributes that are not good. I think the focus is not just on greed but also the overall humanness. The actions/decisions we make that are motivated by emotions, like fear.
To (possibly unfairly) paraphrase Flannery O'Connor, the interstitial chapters are important because readers "are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear." The chapters help me to consider the characters' limited options and lack of agency. Those limitations seem to often be outside the literature we read -- see recent Close Reads selections such as Age of Innocence, Mansfield Park, and the Henriad.
Ok, yall were saying you wanted to hear from someone that loved this book, and I don’t think that is me 😂… but I have to say I enjoy the in between chapters…maybe I’m so dull that I need the author to tell me what to think! I am baffled by the Joad’s decisions throughout the book, and the interstitial chapters help me have some grace for them, that maybe there were bigger things going on than ma’s preferences? But also I just finished the book early this week, and I feel like I will forever be traumatized by that last paragraph 😳.
Steinbeck is weird because he has such a diverse canon. TGOW is the most heavy-handed morally, though The Winter of our Discontent is not subtle. His Monterey novels are almost picaresques, showing the losers and the down and out with humor and without an obvious political message. And he was not a “red” - he was a man of the left but despised ideology. But TGOW was the fruit of a particular, very political anger and it makes it a difficult read for many of us.
I disagree that Steinbeck draws a hard, clear line saying "owning land is evil," or "all poor people good! they are model virtuous examples we should be like!" because every poor person in the book has a clear and often-times overtly stated desire to own a little plot of land to feed their family with and each of the main characters have *very overt* vices -- Al purposely runs over snakes and chases girls, Tom killed a guy, Ma's bossy, Uncle John is haunted by regret, even the preacher is beset by lust!
In my read of the novel, his line draws much more closely between greed and need. Even the smaller farm owners who hire the migrant workers seem morally defensible or at least existing in a moral gray area when they explain that well, the banks are causing them to shut down if they don't sell out or pay low wages, what are they supposed to do? Steinbeck doesn't seem to explicitly say that those people are evil, but that the system makes them choose the lesser good because of the greed of others, top to bottom in society, including the poor. Stealing is presented as an evil choice but morally defensible for men whose children are starving! Greed seems to be what divides good from evil, and I think it does Steinbeck a disservice to minimize his stance into "poor people good!"
(To be clear I'm on board with criticizing all the philosophizing Steinbeck does in the interstitial chapters and how it harms the novel and his "project," such as it is.)
Hannah, I think what you’re saying about the Joads having flaws illustrates the problem the hosts were pointing out about the intervening chapters. In the main narrative chapters, we can see they are real people with real flaws and vices. But then the interstitial chapters lionize “the poor” and actually do make them seem like they are without flaws, even though we’ve seen in the other chapters that they’re not.
Also, I think he absolutely does explicitly state that ownership is evil, I just don’t have my book in front of me right now to pull explicit examples. Which again is contradictory, because you’re right that the poor people do all want to own a little piece of land— but then they wouldn’t be “the poor” any more, so probably wouldn’t be perfect any more according to the worldview he’s laying out.
I think I need to revise my comments above a bit. I was just listening to the most recent episode (Ch 26), and Sean’s explanation of John Locke’s position on property ownership makes me think that you, Hannah, were actually dead on with your distinction between greed and need. I can only say that Steinbeck’s didactic sections don’t explicitly make that distinction, and I wasn’t smart enough to read between the lines and didn’t have that background knowledge about Locke.
I enjoy the interstitial chapters, it's giving the zoomed our view of the current environment the Joads are living in/experiencing. I still have the clear visual of that darn turtle adventuring along in my mind too! 🐢
I agree with the comment above that the poor characters having attributes that are not good. I think the focus is not just on greed but also the overall humanness. The actions/decisions we make that are motivated by emotions, like fear.
I’m totally with Heidi….. I don’t want to finish this book. It does seem to be a million pages, one great agony after another. This is my second time reading it and I will finish it but it is agonizing. I have such a feeling of dread.
I will come out and say that I do like The Grapes of Wrath better than East of Eden. (ducks) I do find it interesting though that when I think about this novel, I remember the Joad family’s story and tend to forget about the in-between chapters. Some of them are very “on the nose” but I have more patience with them. Then again, I love Dickens despite his foibles. This might be evidence that Steinbeck is the American Dickens because I like them both.
So Heidi said everyone knows the ending. I actually don’t, and now I’m really wondering about it!
This was a quote I shared on Goodreads as a status update for my reading progress. It made me reflect on how immigrants are being viewed/treated currently in our country.
This has also been on my mind while reading this book.
I agree with Sean about certain people having more opportunities to do social good and not doing it. I think overall it goes back to the evil of greed motivated by fear. A lot of what the “Okies” are experiencing in this story can relate to the way the immigrants are being viewed/treated in our current environment.
I enjoy the interstitial chapters, it's giving the zoomed our view of the current environment the Joads are living in/experiencing. I still have the clear visual of that darn turtle adventuring along in my mind too! 🐢
I agree with the comment above that the poor characters having attributes that are not good. I think the focus is not just on greed but also the overall humanness. The actions/decisions we make that are motivated by emotions, like fear.
To (possibly unfairly) paraphrase Flannery O'Connor, the interstitial chapters are important because readers "are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear." The chapters help me to consider the characters' limited options and lack of agency. Those limitations seem to often be outside the literature we read -- see recent Close Reads selections such as Age of Innocence, Mansfield Park, and the Henriad.
Ok, yall were saying you wanted to hear from someone that loved this book, and I don’t think that is me 😂… but I have to say I enjoy the in between chapters…maybe I’m so dull that I need the author to tell me what to think! I am baffled by the Joad’s decisions throughout the book, and the interstitial chapters help me have some grace for them, that maybe there were bigger things going on than ma’s preferences? But also I just finished the book early this week, and I feel like I will forever be traumatized by that last paragraph 😳.
Steinbeck is weird because he has such a diverse canon. TGOW is the most heavy-handed morally, though The Winter of our Discontent is not subtle. His Monterey novels are almost picaresques, showing the losers and the down and out with humor and without an obvious political message. And he was not a “red” - he was a man of the left but despised ideology. But TGOW was the fruit of a particular, very political anger and it makes it a difficult read for many of us.
I disagree that Steinbeck draws a hard, clear line saying "owning land is evil," or "all poor people good! they are model virtuous examples we should be like!" because every poor person in the book has a clear and often-times overtly stated desire to own a little plot of land to feed their family with and each of the main characters have *very overt* vices -- Al purposely runs over snakes and chases girls, Tom killed a guy, Ma's bossy, Uncle John is haunted by regret, even the preacher is beset by lust!
In my read of the novel, his line draws much more closely between greed and need. Even the smaller farm owners who hire the migrant workers seem morally defensible or at least existing in a moral gray area when they explain that well, the banks are causing them to shut down if they don't sell out or pay low wages, what are they supposed to do? Steinbeck doesn't seem to explicitly say that those people are evil, but that the system makes them choose the lesser good because of the greed of others, top to bottom in society, including the poor. Stealing is presented as an evil choice but morally defensible for men whose children are starving! Greed seems to be what divides good from evil, and I think it does Steinbeck a disservice to minimize his stance into "poor people good!"
(To be clear I'm on board with criticizing all the philosophizing Steinbeck does in the interstitial chapters and how it harms the novel and his "project," such as it is.)
Hannah, I think what you’re saying about the Joads having flaws illustrates the problem the hosts were pointing out about the intervening chapters. In the main narrative chapters, we can see they are real people with real flaws and vices. But then the interstitial chapters lionize “the poor” and actually do make them seem like they are without flaws, even though we’ve seen in the other chapters that they’re not.
Also, I think he absolutely does explicitly state that ownership is evil, I just don’t have my book in front of me right now to pull explicit examples. Which again is contradictory, because you’re right that the poor people do all want to own a little piece of land— but then they wouldn’t be “the poor” any more, so probably wouldn’t be perfect any more according to the worldview he’s laying out.
I think I need to revise my comments above a bit. I was just listening to the most recent episode (Ch 26), and Sean’s explanation of John Locke’s position on property ownership makes me think that you, Hannah, were actually dead on with your distinction between greed and need. I can only say that Steinbeck’s didactic sections don’t explicitly make that distinction, and I wasn’t smart enough to read between the lines and didn’t have that background knowledge about Locke.
I enjoy the interstitial chapters, it's giving the zoomed our view of the current environment the Joads are living in/experiencing. I still have the clear visual of that darn turtle adventuring along in my mind too! 🐢
I agree with the comment above that the poor characters having attributes that are not good. I think the focus is not just on greed but also the overall humanness. The actions/decisions we make that are motivated by emotions, like fear.
We should circle back to this question in light of the ending.