In addition, if the road symbolizes the spiritual journey of the family and the path to freedom for the farmers, the migrants themselves are represented by the figure of the turtle. Steinbeck dedicates the entire chapter 3 to this allegory. It is all about the adventures of a turtle which it is trying to cross the street without being hitting. But a man beats the turtle’s shell throwing it across the road. So the turtle’s struggle is that to get straight again and to keep going in its way. Hence, the misadventures that the turtle is forced to experience are comparable to the Joads’ difficulties. In a certain sense it foreshadows the family’s trip to California, through which, such as the turtle, they continue their journey, even though they
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There are a lot of images in the novel about insects’ life in the countryside. For example, one of the most significant passages is when Tom hits the grasshopper.
A grasshopper flipped through the window and lighted on top of the instrument panel, where it sat and began to scrape its wings with its angled jumping legs. Joad reached forward and crushed its hard skull-like head with his fingers, and he let it into the wind stream out the window. Joad chuckled again while he brushed the bits of broken insect from his fingertips. Steinbeck 15
The violence on which Tom kills the grasshopper is described in details for one main reason. Steinbeck wants the reader compare this episode with the violence with which the Joad family and the migrants in general are treated. Just like the grasshopper is being subjected and crushed by the predominant power of a human being, Tom, the Joad family, or the migrants in general, are defeated by who hold the economic power. But not only form them. In fact, even the Californian people mistreat the migrants and the Joad family. They consider the farmers bugs because of their tendency to stay clump, and handle them as disgusting …show more content…
If in Californian people’s eyes the disgusting the bugs are the migrants, for the farmers the insects are the cats (tractors). “The tractors come over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects. They crawled over the ground, laying the track and rolling on it and picking it up.” (Steinbeck,40) In this case, the bugs assume an opposite connotation. They are not seen as undefended little creatures that move together to oppose the dominant class, but they are taken as a metaphor because of their more repulsive features. Just as the insects move insidiously, and some of them are even dangerous, the tractors insinuate themselves in a subtle way into the farmers’ properties damaging and destructing their
There are a lot of images in the novel about insects’ life in the countryside. For example, one of the most significant passages is when Tom hits the grasshopper.
A grasshopper flipped through the window and lighted on top of the instrument panel, where it sat and began to scrape its wings with its angled jumping legs. Joad reached forward and crushed its hard skull-like head with his fingers, and he let it into the wind stream out the window. Joad chuckled again while he brushed the bits of broken insect from his fingertips. Steinbeck 15
The violence on which Tom kills the grasshopper is described in details for one main reason. Steinbeck wants the reader compare this episode with the violence with which the Joad family and the migrants in general are treated. Just like the grasshopper is being subjected and crushed by the predominant power of a human being, Tom, the Joad family, or the migrants in general, are defeated by who hold the economic power. But not only form them. In fact, even the Californian people mistreat the migrants and the Joad family. They consider the farmers bugs because of their tendency to stay clump, and handle them as disgusting …show more content…
If in Californian people’s eyes the disgusting the bugs are the migrants, for the farmers the insects are the cats (tractors). “The tractors come over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects. They crawled over the ground, laying the track and rolling on it and picking it up.” (Steinbeck,40) In this case, the bugs assume an opposite connotation. They are not seen as undefended little creatures that move together to oppose the dominant class, but they are taken as a metaphor because of their more repulsive features. Just as the insects move insidiously, and some of them are even dangerous, the tractors insinuate themselves in a subtle way into the farmers’ properties damaging and destructing their