Blog 11

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck was a very interesting, good book. It revealed a lot about the author. It showed his priorites and a lot of what he values. One thing I can tell that the author values is family. The book is very family oriented. He also believed that everyone has a responsibility and should have to do their part in the family. I can tell that he values family because he has the character, Ma, keeping everyone together and working to do that. He had her working hard to keep them together, so as a reader one can tell that he valued the importance of a family and how important it is to stick together when times get tough. Also towards the end of the book when Ruthie, the youngest Joad daughter, reveals to a friend at camp about the murders her brother Tom has committed Ma immedietly contacts Tom and gets him far away because she was fearful of the safety of her son(Steinback 27). Even though her son has done some extremely awful things and committed more than one murder his mother is still there for him and is still looking out for her son.

Another value Steinbeck has present in the novel is never giving up. This is a very similair theme to the book and value of the author to the other novel we read, Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway. Steinbeck shows this value through the families hardships. They go through starvation, not having a job, crime, and other things I could not even imagine having to go through especially being as young as some of Tom's family members were. The family members kept trying to move foward and did not stop thinking that they could get through these hard times.

The Grapes of Wrath is told from more than one perspective. It is told from a character present in the story, and then through a third person narrator. This book has many characters in it with the Joad family having twelve people in it. Being told by the third person narrator is appealing to me because it gives the reader more of an insight to what people are really like and more of a physical description making the book easier to understand for me. The other narration gives you more of the emotional side of some of the stories. Being told from both ways give you sort of the best of both worlds for the book.

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.