Name______ English 3 the Grapes of Wrath Independent Reading Assignment DUE: November 23, 2010

Name______English 3 The Grapes of Wrath Independent Reading Assignment DUE: November 23, 2010 Directions: Read the following chapters and answer the following questions in complete sentences in a notebook or loose-leaf paper. (May be typed) Ch. 1 1.What are the suggestions of the opening descriptions of the dust bowl conditions in Oklahoma?

2. What are the implications of language are such as: "The red dawn came, but no day. In the gray sky a red sun appeared, ad im red circle that gave little light, like dusk; and as the day advanced, the dusk slipped back toward darkness ... ." What seems to have happened? Literally? Figuratively? Why?

3. What were the causes of the dust bowl? How does this relate to the prevailing mode of production and attitudes toward the land at the time?

4. Does Steinbeck also imply causes beyond the physical ones?

5. How does this relate to the title of the novel? Where did Steinbeck get the image of the "grapes of wrath"? What does the image refer to? (See also questions to Ch. 25).

Ch.3 1. What is the significance of the image of the turtle and the oat seed bundle it carries across the road?

2. Why does the truck driver deliberately hit the turtle? What is hinted at by these scenes?

3. What does the highway represent? How about cars and trucks? What is their goal and direction?

4. Is it significant that the turtle is moving in a different direction (southward, crossing the road)?

5. What happens to the turtle and its cargo? What is Steinbeck suggesting?

Ch. 9 1. In the description of the tenants selling their belongings, why is it said "you're not buying only junk, you're buying junked lives ... buying the arms and spirits that might have saved you ... buying a little girl plaiting the forelocks [of a horse] ... buying years of work, toil in the sun ... a sorrow that can't talk"? What is meant by this?

2. What is meant by the statement, "We could have saved you, but you cut us down, and soon you will be cut down and there’ll be none of us to save you"? Who is the speaker? Is that the only possibility? Who else could be saying that (human and non-human)? 2

3. What are the identities of the silenced?

4. Who are the speakers of the "sorrow that can't talk"? How far back in time does this sorrow stretch? How far forward?

5. What is meant by, "And some day--the armies of bitterness will all be going the same way. And they'll all walk together, and there'll be a dead terror from it"? Is this ominous? Why? What does Steinbeck have in mind?

6. Is it only historical (future) or also figurative and symbolic events that he alludes to?

Ch. 11 1. What comparisons/contrasts does Steinbeck offer of organic and inorganic things?

2. What are machines according to him? What are people?

3. What is a "machine man"? 4. Why is he "contemptuous of the land and of himself"? Ch. 12 1. Why do we get two chapters in a row (11 and 12) featuring the abstract, larger perspective rather than the alternation between it and the life of the Joad family?

2. Why is the order of the first third of the novel changed?

3. What has happened on the level of the narrative which affects the form and structure of the novel?

Ch. 14 1. Why are the "owners" in the Western states getting nervous? What do they perceive as the immediate enemy?

2. What is their opinion of goverment intervention and labor unity movements?

3. According to Steinbeck, is technology itself (e.g. tractors) the problem? If not, then what?

4. What are Steinbeck's observations concerning the meaning of "I" and "we"?

5. What is the meaning of the statement: "If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results; if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into 'I,' and cuts you off forever from the 'we.'"?

6. What does Steinbeck imply concerning the future of capitalism and capitalists? 3

Ch. 17 1. What social phenomena take place among the migrant families on the way to California?

2. What rights are established among them? 3. Why does Steinbeck speak of "the right of the hungry to be fed; the rights of the pregnant and the sick to transcend all other rights"? What is the basis of such rights? What rights have to be limited or eliminated? 4. What do the men talk about after supper?

5. Why do they suggest "the country's spoilt"?

6. Are they right in supposing to have a share in the guilt for what is happening, "maybe we sinned some way we didn't know about?

7. What is the effect of the songs of the guitar player? Is this situation a symbol? Is it in any way related to the storytelling craft of the Steinbeck?

Ch. 19 1. How does Steinbeck describe the appropriation of California by Americans?

2. What was the justification of that appropriation? How was it pursued? How was property defined, distributed, protected, and ensured?

3. Is the influence of John Locke's ideas visible in that process? What happened then?

4. How did the character of the owners change over time?

5. What became important instead of land?

6. How did the farmers become 'shopkeepers' of sorts?

7. How is America said to have followed in the steps of Rome?

8. How is the industrialization of farming related to the re-introduction of slavery (of Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, and Filipinos)?

9. What happens to the size of farms and the numbers of owners? 10. How do the owners pay the laborers?

11. How do company stores function?

12. Consider the significance of the following passage from Marx. 4

"Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as is labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a natural force, human labor power....The bourgeois have very good grounds for fancifully ascribing supernatural creative power to labor, since it follows precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature, that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, and hence only live with their permission." How does it illuminate the peculiar problems encountered by the Joads in a land as rich as California? How does it address the inadequacies of a labor theory of value?:

13. Why do wealthy Californians hate the 'Okies'?

14. How is Roman history, supposedly replayed in the migrations of hungry families into California?

15. Why does Steinbeck call them "the new barbarians"?

16. Why is it said that "a fallow field is a sin and the unused land a crime against the thin children"?

17. What is done to oranges and other produce if the price is low?

18. What is a Hooverville? Why is it given such a name?

19. Consider the significance of the following passage: "And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people is hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed."  What allusions is Steinbeck making when speaking of "the inevitability of that day"? What day is he talking about? How is this connected to the concept of the grapes of wrath? (Consider the possible connections to a Medieval Latin hymn, "Dies irae, dies illae" ('the day of wrath, that day') describing the Day of Judgment and used in the mass for the dead.

20. What is Steinbeck effectively foretelling? How does he interpret biblical and religious ideas? Ch. 21 1. How does Steinbeck define the danger of machines?

2. What makes technology a threat to humanity?

3. What are the "paradoxes of industry" that Steinbeck refers to? What do they result in? 5

4. What happens to wages and prices with the ever increasing supply of laborers in California?

5. How can the owners cling on to their property in the situation described?

6. Ultimately, without knowing it, what are banks and companies working toward?

7. What line does Steinbeck suggest will eventually be crossed by the exploited laborers?

8. What is the importance of the following passage?: "And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for blacklists, for drilling. On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment."

9. In the tripartite structure of the novel, what process has begun? Ch. 23 1. What forms of entertainment are available to the working people?

2. What is the significance of the storyteller?

3. How do these passages relate to the songs of the guitar player in Ch. 17?

4. What is the significance of the story told? Why is it about the Indians?

5. What does the storyteller suggest? How do these issues relate to what the workers and the country as a whole is experiencing in the novel's present? Who is responsible?

6. Consider the significance of the following passage: "They was a brave on a ridge, against the sun. Knowed he stood out. Spread his arms an' stood. Naked as morning, an' against the sun. Maybe he was crazy, I don't know. Stood there, arms spread out; like a cross he looked. Four hundred yards. An' the men--well, they raised their sights an' they felt the wind with their fingers; an' then they jus' lay there and couldn' shoot. Maybe that Injun knowed somepin. Knowed we couldn' shoot. Jes' laid there with the rifles cocked, an' didn' even put 'em to our shoulders. Lookin's at him. Head-band, one feather. Could see it, an' naked as the sun. Long time we laid there an' looked, an' he never moved. An' then the captain got mad. 'Shoot, you crazy bastards, shoot!' he yells. An' we jus' laid there. 'I'll give you to a five-count, an' then mark you down,' the captain says. Well, sir--we put up our rifles slow, an' ever' man hoped some-body's shoot first. I ain't never been so sad in my life. An' I laid my sights on his belly, cause' you can't stop a Injun no other place--an'--then. Well, he jest plunkered down an' rolled. An' we went up. An' he wasn' big--he'd looked so grand--up there. All tore to pieces an' little. Ever see a cock pheasant, stiff and beautiful, ever' feather drawed an' painted, an' even his eyes drawed in pretty? An' bang! You pick him up--bloody an' twisted, an' you spoiled somepin better'n you; an' eatin' him don't make it up to you, 'cause you spoiled somepin in yaself, an' you can't never fix it up" 6

Ch. 25 1. Why is the fruit not picked and is instead allowed to rot? Why is it deliberately destroyed?

2. How is Steinbeck employing the idea of rot and decay as a metaphor?

3. Besides unharvested fruit, what is rotting and decaying? What are the causes of that corruption? 4. Consider the following passages: “There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates--died of malnutrition--because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is a failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”  How is Steinbeck employing the image of the grapes of wrath?

5. Consider the following biblical verses: "The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God's wrath" Revelation 14:19. What might the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932 (overwhelmingly defeating the Hoover) have averted in the United States?

6. In what way did Roosevelt's economic policies address some of the problems described by Steinbeck?

7. How did they reverse the policies of Hoover and the Republicans?

8. How do those issues relate to the contemporary situation in the United States? Is the danger of severe economic slumps still real?

9. Could the U.S. go hungry again on such a massive scale? What could cause such a disaster?

10. What about the world economic system as a whole?

11. Is the misery in which most people still live throughout the world a problem with a solution? What are the core issues surrounding the existence of misery and hunger? What are the core issues surrounding their solution?

12. What does Steinbeck think of the scientists and technicians who work to improve crops and increase productivity in farming?

13. What happens to the prices of produce with such improvements in productivity? What happens over time to the small farmers? 7

14. What stands between the abundance of food generated by improving techniques and the hungry people who need it?

15. What does Steinbeck suggest about people with enough brains to develop wonderful technologies but who are seemingly unable to come up with a rational system for the distribution of products?

Ch. 27 1. Is the situation different for cotton pickers than for the peach pickers at the Hooper Ranch?

2. What are the different ways in which cotton pickers are cheated by their employers?

3. What are the workers forced to do?

4. How are the wages in this line of work?

5. Why can the workers afford "side-meat"? Will the situation last? Why not?

6. Who is the working people's worst enemy?

Ch. 29 1. What is the significance and effects of the torrential rains and floods?

2. Do people get help from the government? What happens?

3. What are people forced to do?