Summary and Analysis for Chapters 7 and 9

The Grapes of Wrath Summary and analysis for chapters 7 and 9 Taken from sparknotes.com

Summary: Chapter 7 The narrator assumes the voice of a used-car salesman explaining to his employees how to cheat the departing families. The great westward exodus has created a huge demand for automobiles, and dusty used-car lots spring up throughout the area. Crooked salesmen sell the departing families whatever broken-down vehicles they can find. The salesmen fill engines with sawdust to conceal noisy transmissions and replace good batteries with cracked ones before they deliver the cars. The tenant farmers, desperate to move and with little knowledge of cars, willingly pay the skyrocketing prices, much to the salesmen’s delight.

Summary: Chapter 9 The narrator shifts focus from the Joads to describe how the tenant farmers in general prepare for the journey to California. For much of the chapter, the narrator assumes the voice of typical tenant farmers, expressing what their possessions and memories of their homes mean to them. The farmers are forced to pawn most of their belongings, both to raise money for the trip and simply because they cannot take them on the road. In the frenzied buying and selling that follows, the farmers have no choice but to deal with brokers who pay outrageously low prices, knowing that the farmers are in no position to bargain. Disappointed, the farmers return to their wives and report that they have sold most of their property for a pocketful of change. The wives linger over objects with sentimental value, but everything must be sold or destroyed before the families can leave for California.

Analysis of chapters 7 and 9 The short chapters that bookend the introduction of the Joad family develop one of the book’s major themes. The narrative’s indictment of the crooked car salesmen and pawnbrokers illustrates man’s inhumanity to man, a force against which the Joads struggle. Time and again, those in positions of power seek to take advantage of those below them. Even when giving up a portion of land might save a family, the privileged refuse to imperil their wealth. Later in the novel, there is nothing that the California landowners fear as much as relinquishing their precious land to the needy farmers. This behavior contradicts Jim Casy’s belief that men must act for the good of all men. In The Grapes of Wrath, moral order depends upon this kind of selflessness and charity. Without these virtues, the text suggests, there is no hope for a livable world. As one farmer warns the corrupt pawnbroker who robs him of his possessions: “[Y]ou cut us down, and soon you will be cut down and there’ll be none of us to save you.”