Grapes Of Wrath Community Analysis

A community is a group in which the members generally have a defining quality. This quality is what keeps this group as a unit rather than a bunch of individual people. In John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, community is something that is largely focused on throughout the story of Tom Joad’s journey to California. This story takes place in the heat of the Great Depression, sending enormous amounts of people away from their homes to find work elsewhere; Tom Joad and his family are no different. In Steinbeck’s words, “For the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I’, and cuts you off forever from the ‘we’” (152). There are three times in the book that showcase the importance of with these people: the death of Grandpa, their night at a campsite, and the Joads’ first few nights in California. Grandpa Joad passes away very early in the story, but his death is a turning point for the entire Joad family. Through having a stroke, Grandpa combines the Joads and the Wilsons into a larger community, all of whom are trying to get away in search of work and a better life. This event dilates the perspective of not only the Joad family, but the Wilsons as well. Though they did not know Grandpa Joad, nor were they related by blood, the Wilson family were still quick to help Grandpa pass …show more content…
Tom and his family would have been unlikely to survive if it were not for the many among them that advised and helped them. As Adlai E. Stevenson once said, “on this shrunken globe, men can no longer live as strangers,” and the Joads found this to be a rich truth. They were physically close with other people, and they therefore formed a community. Not only that, but their paths were hardly deviant from one another. Community is not only the build up of people, but the binding of those people by experience and, though it might sound cheesy,