Grapes of Wrath - Analysis 11 essays

Grapes of Wrath - Analysis 11 essays In chapter 11 of the Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck describes the scene after all the farmers have left. In this, he creates a sense of injustice, injustice to the farmers who have had to leave their land and to the land who is deprived of life and understanding. When the farmers leave their land, the land becomes vacant, but farm workers are soon upon it with tractors. This is injustice to the land. Steinbeck compares these tractors to horses. He states that tractors are alive but when the motor of the tractor stops, it is...dead. Tractors are easy and efficient but nonetheless when the job is done, they are dead. A horse, on the other hand, stops work and goes into the barn but unlike the tractor there is life and vitality left in a horse because it is very alive. Horses have the warmth of life...and the heat and smell of life that fills the barn, but in a tractor the heat goes out...like the living heat that leaves a corpse. The tractor is dead, but the earth is not. It is unfair that such dead things should have to work the land. The earth itself needs life to nourish it and work it, i.e. the horses. Steinbeck explains that even though men continue to work the land, these men have no real connection to their work. These corporate farm workers come to the farmland during the day, drive a tractor over it, and then leave to go home. Such a separation, Steinbeck explains, causes men to lose wonder for their work and for the land. For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land but this is the way the farm workers and corporate men see it. They do not understand what the land truly is. They know only chemistry and analysis. They know only the profit that these two can bring. But the farmer is different. He alone ...