In John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, the author has a distinct voice starting from the very beginning. The story, Grapes of Wrath, is told in the late nineteen thirties during the drought in Oklahoma where needed works are scarce. The owners of farmland are kicking their tenant farmers off of their land, making them jobless, homeless, and practically on the brink of starvation (Steinbeck 34) Even if the land owners had to plow them away, they did. I think it was so crude of them to hire their neighbors to tractor them all away off the land, and out of their homes. John Steinbeck writes very much in the perspective of the farmers. Through his writing we see Steinbeck sympathizes with the farmers on several occasions, more so often than not. Steinbeck probably valued hard work. He probably also had a lot of opinions about class welfare and difference between rich and poor. The author sides with the farmers, but also makes a point to show that he has no sympathy for the land owners in Oklahoma, the neighbors tractoring the farmers off of their fellow neighbors land, or the civilians of California. Steinbeck does not show the reader their perspective when they are essentially the ones on the receiving line of the outcome of the drought. One cannot do much but take the side of the poor farmers, Tom Joad and his family, even though Tom himself went to jail for a total of four years for killing a man. He has some pretty heinous qualities, yet we as the reader side for him because he is put through the trauma of the devastation from the drought. One could see that the land owners are just doing what they have to. They cannot have people draining them of money when there is no farm to tend. Just as in real life as the saying goes, "Just try stepping in their shoes." This should have been done by both parties before they both judged and made decisions that they themselves deemed right.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print.
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