"Cliff Notes - Grapes of Wrath, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

10. Joads prepare to leave tractors
13. Journey begins; Joads meet 7. Used-car lots
Wilsons; Grampa dies 9. What to keep, what to sell
16. Car trouble; Ma rebels; 11. Alienated work; vacant
ragged prophet houses
18. Joads reach California; Noah 12. Route 66
leaves; Granma dies; Joads 14. Socialism; "I" versus "we"
cross desert 15. Roadside truck-stops
20. Hooverville: Casy arrested; 17. Roadside camps
Connie vanishes 19. California landowners;
22. Weedpatch government camp Hoovervilles; fear of
24. Saturday night dance Okies
26. Peach picking; strike; Casy 21. Fear-filled owners versus
killed; Tom in trouble hungry workers
28. Boxcar camp; Ruthie tells 23. Camp entertainment
on Tom; Tom leaves 25. Economics of abundance
30. Floods; Rose of Sharon feeds 27. Cotton
stranger 29. The floods

^^^^^^^^^^THE GRAPES OF WRATH: CHAPTER 1

In the opening chapter, Steinbeck takes us to the Dust Bowl, the vast, dried-out farmland of the Southwest in the 1930s. He shows us the gradual bleaching of the land.

What was green and rich and fertile loses its life and turns to dust. Drained of moisture, the red earth turns pink and the gray earth turns to white dust. The wind sweeps the rain clouds away and sends dust billowing into the sky.

Steinbeck then shows us the people. Families worry about the land and crops. The wives worry that their men may crack under the strain. Since the farmers can't fight the weather, they sit silently and hope for rain.

NOTE: This description of the coming of drought is the first of the novel's interchapters. In only a few pages you see the effects of a months-long drought. You are introduced to a motif that will recur as you continue reading, namely, the bond between the land and the people. If land goes bad, life goes bad. But the people are hardy and stoic. They hurt, but they don't break.

The chapter ends in stillness, like the calm before a storm, and in contrast to the start of the next chapter.

^^^^^^^^^^THE GRAPES OF WRATH: CHAPTER 2

A huge shiny-red tractor-trailer, its engine roaring, stands by a roadside diner. Tom Joad, freshly sprung from the penitentiary at McAlester, persuades the trucker to give him a lift, despite the No Riders sign. "Sometimes a guy'll be a good guy even if some rich bastard makes him carry a sticker," says Tom.

How can the trucker refuse to give Tom a ride after such a statement? He wants to be a "good guy" and he certainly wouldn't like to be considered his boss's stooge.

NOTE: The incident tells us something about ties between workers and employers. Doesn't the driver's willingness to pick up Tom suggest that at some point kinship among working people begins to carry more weight than the power of bosses? Steinbeck has begun to develop an idea that later balloons into a major theme in the novel--how working men wield power when they stick together.

Tom's conversation with the driver introduces us to background material about the condition of the land (it's "dusty"), about farmers who have quit (they're "going fast now"), and life on the road (truck drivers become "goddamn sick of goin'"). It also gives the reader a chance to learn about Tom (his father is "a cropper," i.e., a sharecropper), and that Tom is on his way home after serving four years behind bars for homicide.

If we judge Tom by the way he talks to the driver, he seems to have a great big chip on his shoulder. He's coarse and insulting, hardly the kind of fellow you'd like for a traveling companion. Why he berates the truck driver who has done him a favor is unclear. Maybe Tom is just an ungrateful tough guy. On the other hand, his aggressiveness might be explained by his clothes, which brand him as a new ex-con. He knows that people are inquisitive. They probe and sometimes ask embarrassing questions. Acting tough will keep nosy people at a distance.

^^^^^^^^^^THE GRAPES OF WRATH: CHAPTER 3

In this interchapter we watch a land turtle's slow and painful journey through roadside grass, across a highway, and over an embankment. The turtle leaves a beaten trail behind him. Whatever hinders his progress is repelled by his hard shell. A red ant that crawls underneath the shell gets crushed. A woman in a sedan avoids the turtle, but the driver of a pick-up truck swerves to hit him. The wheel nicks the turtle and sends him spinning onto his back. Stopped temporarily, the turtle pauses. After a brief struggle to right himself, he continues his march.

How puzzling to find a chapter about a turtle in The Grapes of Wrath. It's different from everything in the novel so far. Let's assume that Steinbeck knows what he's doing, and that he has a sensible plan to fit this turtle into the novel.

In the meantime, it might be worth observing some of the turtle's most apparent qualities. He has tenacity above all: despite obstacles, the turtle drives himself ever forward. He also has endurance, strength, and pride. Steinbeck says the turtle has "hands," and "fierce, humorous eyes," which peer ahead across the road.