Before the Joads have left Oklahoma, a man who used to be a preacher tells Tom what he worked out in the wilderness. He went looking for his own soul and could not find one that belonged to him. What he found instead was a fragment of something much larger. “Maybe all men got one big soul”, he says, and everybody is a piece of it. The Grapes of Wrath then spends six hundred pages testing that proposition against hunger, and the family is the thing it tests it on. This piece discusses the whole novel, including the last page.
Jim Casy Is the Thesis of The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath gives up its preacher early: Casy has quit because he could not reconcile what he taught with what he did, and the novel is careful to make him unimpressive rather than saintly. He is awkward, he talks too much, he takes a long time to be useful, and Tom finds his ideas tiresome for most of the journey.
That slowness is deliberate. Casy’s argument has to be unpersuasive at first, because the book needs the reader to arrive at it the way the characters do, which is through exhaustion rather than conviction. When Casy finally acts, taking the blame for a fight he did not start so that Tom can stay free, the idea stops being talk.
He dies in a creek bed with a pick handle, and his last words are a version of what Christ says on the cross. Steinbeck is not being subtle. But the parallel matters less than what happens to the argument afterwards: it survives him, and it is Tom who carries it.
Ma Joad Does What Casy Only Describes
This is the argument a group reading The Grapes of Wrath will have, and the one worth having. Casy gets the philosophy. The Grapes of Wrath gives all its best speeches to men. Yet almost everything the book actually proves is proved by Ma.
She is the one who decides the family travels together when Pa would have split it. She lies all night in the back of the truck beside her mother’s body so the crossing will not be stopped, and tells nobody until morning. And she feeds strangers’ children out of a pot she knows will not stretch, in front of her own. When Pa’s authority collapses with the loss of his land, she takes it over without announcement and without ever claiming it.
Pa notices eventually and complains that she is getting bossy. Her answer is the clearest statement of the book’s theme by anyone, and she makes it as a practical observation rather than a doctrine: a man lives in jerks, a baby born and a farm lost, while a woman takes it all as one flow that keeps going.
Casy says people are part of one soul. Ma behaves as though they are, for four hundred pages, without once theorising about it.
The Grapes of Wrath Keeps Losing People
Twelve people and a dog set out in The Grapes of Wrath. Keeping count is the single most useful thing a reading group can do with this novel, because the losses are reported almost casually and the book never pauses on them.
The dog is killed on the highway in the first days. Grampa has a stroke before they clear the state line. They dig for him by the roadside and tuck a written note into a jar beside the body, so that anyone turning the soil later will know nobody killed him. Granma dies crossing the desert. Noah, the eldest, simply walks away downriver and is not pursued. Connie, Rose of Sharon’s husband, disappears without a word. Casy is arrested, then killed. Tom leaves. Rose of Sharon’s baby is born dead.
By the barn at the end, the thing that set out from Sallisaw has been taken apart. That is not a series of misfortunes; it is the structure making its case. The family cannot survive as a unit, so either it stops being the unit or everyone in it dies.
What Tom Decides in the Culvert
The decisive scene of The Grapes of Wrath happens in a drainage culvert, where Tom is hiding with a broken nose and a face the police can identify. Ma crawls in to find him in the dark, and because she cannot see him she traces his face with her fingers to remember it.
What he tells her is that he has been thinking about Casy, and can suddenly remember all of it. He repeats the passage Casy quoted from Ecclesiastes, about two being better than one because if one falls the other can lift him. And he draws the conclusion the entire novel has been constructing: “a fella ain’t no good alone”.
Then he tells her what he intends to do, which is what Casy did. Ma points out that Casy was killed. Tom agrees, and goes anyway.
For a discussion, the productive question is whether this is a hopeful scene. Tom is leaving a family that needs him in order to pursue an idea that got the last man killed, and his mother has to accept it. The book presents it as growth. It is also, read coldly, a woman losing a fourth person and being asked to call it progress.
What Steinbeck Saw Himself, and What He Changed
The Grapes of Wrath was reported before it was invented. He wrote a series of articles on the migrant camps for a San Francisco paper in 1936, and worked closely with a federal camp manager who gave him records and introductions. The Weedpatch camp in the novel, where the residents elect their own committees and keep the deputies out, is drawn from a real one.
Publication in April 1939 produced an organised response. That August the Kern County supervisors voted to pull the book from county libraries and schools, and the local growers’ association staged a burning for the cameras. The charge was that the book was a pack of lies. It won the Pulitzer the following year.
There is also a distortion worth knowing. The Dust Bowl proper hit the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, while the Joads are from Sallisaw in the east of the state, which was not dust-bowl country; they are pushed off by tractors and tenancy, not sand. Steinbeck merges two migrations into one family. It makes a better novel and a shakier history, and it is the one factual objection to the book
that has never really been answered. Worth raising at a meeting, if only because the people who
burned it in 1939 were not complaining about that.
Rose of Sharon Is Set Up for Four Hundred Pages
Readers who object to the ending usually object that it comes from nowhere. It does not, and tracking her is the most rewarding second-read in The Grapes of Wrath.
She begins as the most self-absorbed person in the family. Pregnant and newly married, she turns her whole attention inward on the baby and on Connie, who has told her they will live in town, that he will study radio by correspondence and get a shop of his own. She repeats these plans to anyone who will listen. When the family needs hands, she is excused.
Then it is taken away in instalments. Connie vanishes without even an argument, and she has to hear from her father that he has gone. A woman at the Hooverville tells her the dancing she did at the camp has probably killed her baby, and she believes it. She picks cotton in the rain because the family needs the wage, and that is the night the labour starts.
By the barn she has lost the husband, the plans, the town, the shop and the child. The point is not that suffering has ennobled her. It is that every private thing she was holding on to has been removed, and only at that point does she do the one act the novel has been arguing towards.
Whether a reader finds that moving or manipulative is the real test of the book. But nobody can say it is unprepared.
Questions Worth Bringing to a Meeting
- Casy gets the ideas and Ma gets the actions. Is that Steinbeck’s judgement or his blind spot?
- Is Tom right to leave? Would the book be braver if it admitted the cost to Ma?
- Noah walks away and nobody goes after him. Why does the novel let that pass so quickly?
- Does the Weedpatch camp make the book hopeful, or is it there to show what is being withheld?
- Rose of Sharon is passive for five hundred pages. Does the last scene redeem that or expose it?
How The Grapes of Wrath Ends, and Why It Was Nearly Cut
Shelter at last is a barn, and it is raining. The child Rose of Sharon carried the whole way has arrived dead. Against the far wall lies a stranger whose son explains that his father has not eaten in six days, having passed every scrap to the boy, and is now past keeping anything down.
What happens next happens almost entirely in silence. A glance between mother and daughter does all the negotiating. One syllable of assent, and the room is emptied of men and children. Then a girl who has been given almost nothing to do in this book crosses the floor, lies down, and keeps a stranger alive with her own body. The final thing Steinbeck shows us is her face, and she is smiling at something we are not told.
Steinbeck’s publishers pushed him to change it and he would not. Readers have been divided ever since, and both objections are fair: it is abrupt, and it uses a young woman’s body to make a point she is given no words about. The defence is that the scene is the argument finally performed rather than spoken. Casy said no one has a soul of their own. The Grapes of Wrath closes on a stranger being kept alive by a girl with nothing left to give but that, her people shut out in the wet a few feet away, and not one word in the scene inviting us to call it noble. The novel simply shows it and stops.
That restraint is the answer to the charge of heavy-handedness. Steinbeck spent thirty chapters arguing, often loudly, that the family is finished as a unit of survival. Having made the case, he declines to make it again in the one place where a lesser writer would have.
Groups wanting a companion read will get the most from The Four Winds, which covers the same migration with a mother at the centre, and our analysis of The Little Prince shows the same method applied to a book usually handed to children.
That is either the most earned ending in American fiction or the most heavy-handed. A good meeting will not agree, which is the best reason to read it together.
Read in the Penguin edition, which carries an introduction by Robert DeMott; the quotations here are Steinbeck’s own words, not the editor’s. Viking published the novel first, in April 1939.