Making It New: 1900–1945 465westward movement that helped shape the history of the American nation. What
the Joad family find when they reach California, however, is no land of promise. For
these Western adventurers, there is no realization of a dream of freedom. There is
only further injustice and inequity, more poverty and pain. Tom Joad, the older son
in the Joad family and the epic hero, joins with Jim Casy, a minister turned labor
organizer, to try to build resistance to the exploitation of the “Okies,” as they are
dismissively called, and other migrant laborers. Casy is killed; Tom kills to avenge his
death; those few members of the Joad family who have survived try to hide Tom.
But then Tom leaves, telling his mother: “I’ll be ever’where – wherever you look.
Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.” “Maybe,” he tells Ma
Joad, “a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one.” “God, I’m
talkin’ like Casy,” he reflects, on saying this. “Comes to thinkin’ about him so much.
Seems like I can see him sometimes.” Casy has died but the spirit of Casy, his belief
in collective identity and action, lives on in Tom. Not only that, the intimation is, it
will soon be “ever’where,” just as the spirit of Jesus Christ (whose initials are recalled
in Casy’s own name) spread everywhere after his death. That spirit is evidently at
work in the last, symbolic moment of The Grapes of Wrath when Rose of Sharon,
Tom’s sister, who has just given birth to a stillborn child, nurses an anonymous
starving man with the milk intended for her baby. She has recognized, as Tom has,
her involvement in a collective being, a communal identity larger than her own
immediate family; and she has realized, instinctively, that her giving of herself to
that communality is the source of renewal.
As its title indicates, as well as its narrative drive, The Grapes of Wrath is an angry
but also a fundamentally optimistic book. Recalling “The Battle-Hymn of the
Republic” with its prophecy of truth marching to victory, and recollecting an earlier
triumph over another kind of oppression, that title announces what the book will
say: that the oppressors will be conquered, with a crusade to end poverty, virtual
serfdom, succeeding in the twentieth century, just as the crusade to end slavery
triumphed in the nineteenth. Steinbeck acknowledges the power of the oppressors
and catalogs, in remorseless detail, the destitution and defeats of their victims –
people like the Joads who, in the present system, seem to have nowhere to turn.
But he also anticipates the trampling under of that power. Weaving together the
literal and legendary, the details of history and possibilities of myth, he outlines
not only what America is but what it might be. And what it might be is registered,
not just in the conversion of people like Casy, Tom, and Rose of Sharon, not just in
the quizzical comments of other characters as they grope toward some form of
political consciousness, and not just in the transformation of the religion of Christ
on the cross into a religion of man on the move. It is there, also, in the sheer sweep
of Steinbeck’s prose as he describes the vastness of the American continent. In
terms of narrative fact, the westward movement of The Grapes of Wrath may meet
with closure. But, as far as narrative feeling is concerned, there remains something
else: the conviction that there is still space, and time, to find a true West. The betrayal
of the American dream may be what gives the novel its quality of barely controlled
rage. But the belief in the continuing presence of that dream, as a source of renewal,GGray_c04.indd 465ray_c 04 .indd 465 8 8/1/2011 7:54:01 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 01 AM