Much like his contemporary John Dos Passos who uses
Newsreels consisting of headlines and fragments of articles from such newspapers
as the Chicago Tribune and New York World in
his U.S.A. Trilogy, John Steinbeck employs intercalary chapters in
Grapes of Wrath that give "a camera's eye" look at realia in the
Great Depression.
In Chapter Seven, for instance, Steinbeck
describes how used car salesmen responded to the demand for second-hand vehicles during
the great exit of the Okies from the Dust Bowl. Because they knew little about
automobiles, these salesmen victimized the desperate dispossessed. Steinbeck describes
them as predatory,
readability="9">Owners with rolled-up sleeves. Salesmen, neat,
deadly, small intent eyes watching for
weaknesses.Chapter Nine
presents the Jefferson Agrarian theory that people removed from their land will lose
much as the women must part with sentimental articles just to keep their family going
when the men return with little or no money after trying to sell their farm
tools. Chapter Twelve, too, serves as an example of a portrait of Americana in the 1930s
as it describes the route that went coast to coast in the U. S., Route 66. In another
chapter of this kind, Steinbeck writes of the fraternity of the displaced Americans,
describing one man who made a trailer and has put all his belongings in it; then he
waits alongside the highway. A car finally comes by and the owner hooks his trailer to
the automobile, taking the man with his family.In Chapter
Twenty-One, there is a summary of the attitudes of the Okies, who have transformed
from"questing people" to "migrants" that have been pushed out by machines. The
transformation of the Okies from hard-working contented farmers to cruel wanderers with
"hunger in their eyes" who are dehumanized by the uncaring and exploitive "great
owners." Truly, in this chapter, the alteration of those who are disenfranchised is
well protrayed.In his powerful novel set in the Great
Depression, John Steinbeck illustrates through his intercalary chapters the changing
face of America, one in which hunger and desperation and alienation and want and
sometimes fraternity have become a subsociety in the 1930s.
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