[In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1970, Lisca discusses the relevance of Steinbeck's portrayal of social and economic upheaval in The Grapes of Wrath to later readers in times of similar turbulence.]

The Grapes of Wrath, more than Steinbeck's other novels, remains viable not just in drugstore racks of Bantam paperbacks or in college survey courses but in the world of great literature, because in that novel he created a community whose experience, although rooted firmly in the particulars of the American Depression, continues to have relevance. Certainly one aspect of that community experience which contributes to its viability is its dimension of social change. It is not coincidence that in the last decade, full of violent social action in so many aspects of American life, we have found ourselves turning with new interest toward the 1930s, recognizing there an immediate political and emotional relevance. The Grapes of Wrath moves not only along Route 66, east to west, like some delayed Wagon Wheels adventure, but along the unmapped roads of social change, from an old concept of community based on sociological conditions breaking up under an economic upheaval, to a new and very different sense of community formulating itself gradually on the new social realities.

Various facets of the old community concept are solidly developed in the first quarter of the book. The novel opens with a panoramic description of the land itself, impoverished, turning to dust and quite literally blowing away. It can no longer sustain its people in the old way, one small plot for each family, and it is lost to the banks and holding companies—impersonal, absentee landlords—which can utilize the land with a margin of profit by the ruthless mechanical exploitation of large tracts. But for the old community the land was something more than a quick-money crop or columns of profit and loss in a financial ledger, more even than the actual physical sustenance of potatoes, carrots, melons, pigs and chickens. Nor is it fear of the unknown that keeps the community attached to the now useless land. For these are a people with pioneer blood in their veins. The old community is further tied to the land by memories of family history. It is Muley who speaks this most convincingly:

I'm just wanderin' aroun' like a damn ol' graveyard ghos'. … I been goin' aroun' the places where stuff happened. Like there's a place over by our forty; in a gulley there's a bush. Fust time I ever laid with a girl was there. Me fourteen an' stampin' an' jerkin' an' snortin' like a buck deer, randy as a billygoat. So I went there an' I laid down on the groun', an' I seen it all happen again. An' there's the place down by the barn where Pa got gored to death by a bull. An' his blood is right in that groun', right now. … An' I put my han' on that groun' where my own Pa's blood is part of it. … An' I seen my Pa with a hole through his ches', an' I felt him shiver up against me like he done. … An' me a little kid settin' there. … An' I went into the room where Joe was born. Bed wasn't there, but it was the room. An' all them things is true, an' they're right in the place they happened. Joe came to life right there.

Muley rambles, but his selection is not arbitrary—copulation, birth, death. And these are not just vague memories or abstractions. In the presence of the actual bush, the actual barnyard, the same room, this essential past is relived in the present. Muley asks, “What'd they take when they tractored the folks off the lan'? What'd they get so their ‘margin a profit’ was safe? They got Pa dyin' on the groun', an' Joe yellin' his first breath, an' me jerkin' like a billygoat under a bush in the night. What'd they get? God knows the lan' ain't no good. … They jus' chopped folks in two. Place where folks live is them folks.”

Here Muley speaks not only for himself, but for an entire community, the people in whose deserted houses at night he can still sense the “parties an' dancin',” the “meetin's an' shoutin' glory. They was weddin's, all in them houses.” So strong is his attachment that he chooses to stay with the land and its empty houses rather than move away with the rest of his family. Grandpa Joad, too, despite his eagerness at the beginning, was not able to leave the land and had to be given an overdose of pain-killer and carried off. When he dies, just before crossing the Oklahoma border, Casy assures the folks that “Grampa didn't die tonight. He died the minute you took 'im off the place. … Oh, he was breathin', but he was dead. He was that place, an' he knowed it. … He's jus' stayin' with the lan'. He couldn't leave it.” This is amplified to the level of community experience in one of the interchapters, when the choiric voices intone: “This land, this red land is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us.”

As the land itself and its houses are imbued with a traditional experience, so are the farm tools, horses, wagons, the household goods whose value cannot be measured in money: the beaded headband for the bay gelding, “'Member how he lifted his feet when he trotted?” And the little girl who liked to plait red ribbons in his mane. “This book. My father had it. … Pilgrim's Progress. Used to read it. … This china dog … Aunt Sadie brought it from the Saint Louis fair. See? Wrote right on it.” It is a community experience which is imaginatively voiced to the buyers of these goods: “You are not buying only junk, you're buying junked lives. … How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?”

In addition to the identity invested in the land, the houses and personal possessions, all of which must be left behind, the community is also defined in terms of social customs and mores. That it is patriarchal, for example, is clear from the deference of the women to male decision and authority. When the decision is made to include Casy in the group, Ma Joad is consulted about whether there would be food enough and space, but once that decision is made, Casy, who “knew the government of families,” takes his place among the planning men. “Indeed, his position was eminent, for Uncle John moved sideways, leaving space between Pa and himself for the preacher. Casy squatted down like the others, facing Grampa enthroned on the running board. Ma went to the house again.” It does not matter that Grampa is senile and utterly useless. Formally, his titular headship must be acknowledged, and, at this point in the novel, Ma must leave men to men's business. Again, when the family is seating itself in their truck, ready to leave, Uncle John would have liked his pregnant niece, Rosasharn, instead of himself, to sit up front in the comfortable seat next to the driver. But he knows “this was impossible, because she was young and a woman.” The traditional distinction in social role is also evident in Ma's embarrassment at Casy's offer to salt down the pork. “I can do it,” he says; “there's other stuff for you to do.” Ma “stopped her work then and inspected him oddly, as though he suggested a curious thing. … ‘It's women's work,’ she said finally.” The preacher's reply is significant of many changes to come in the community's sense of identity and the individual's sense of his total role: “It's all work,” he replies. “They's too much of it to split it up to men's or women's work.”

It is fitting that this break from domestic traditions should be announced by Casy, who is the first person from his community whom Tom meets on the way home from prison, and who announces at that meeting that he, the preacher, the spiritual source and authority of that community, has already abandoned the old dispensation and is seeking a new and better one. And after hearing his short, two-sentence, unorthodox testament of belief in an oversoul, a human spirit “ever'body's a part of,” Tom says, “You can't hold no church with idears like that. People would drive you out of the country with idears like that. Jumpin' an' yellin'. That's what folks like. Makes you feel swell. When Granma got to talkin' in tongues, you couldn't tie her down. She could knock over a full-growed deacon with her fist.” Later in the novel other details of this old-time religion are given, such as the mass total immersions; Pa, full of the spirit, jumping over a high bush and breaking his leg; and Casy going to lie in the grass with young girls of his congregation whose religious fervor he had excited. But Casy is through with all that now, and these particular aspects of community, like those inherent in the land, the houses and personal goods, the domestic codes—all must be left behind.

This is not to say, however, that the sense and need of community is lost or has been destroyed. Steinbeck presents this sense and need on several levels from the biological to the mythical and religious. The novel's first interchapter is that masterful description of the turtle crossing the road, surviving both natural hazards and the attempts of man to frustrate its efforts. The turtle is clearly a symbol of the unthinking yet persistent life force. “Nobody can't keep a turtle though,” says Casy. “They work at it and work at it, and at last one day they get out and away they go. …” The fact that this turtle has been going southwest, that Tom picks it up as a present to the family, and that it continues southwest when released, clearly identifies this turtle and its symbolic attributes with the Joads and the migrants. In them too, there exists the instinct for survival and the necessity for movement which form, on the most elemental level, the basis of community.

The last interchapter of the novel's first part (before the Joads actually start their trip) also presents a biological argument. The abandoned houses are only temporarily without life. Soon they are part of a whole new ecology.

When the folks first left, and the evening of the first day came, the hunting cats slouched in from the fields and mewed on the porch. And when no one came out, the cats crept through the open doors and walked mewing through the empty rooms. And then they went back to the fields and were wild cats from then on, hunting gophers and field mice, and sleeping in ditches in the daytime. When the night came, the bats, which had stopped at the doors for fear of light, swooped into the houses and sailed about through the empty rooms, and in a little while they stayed in dark room corners during the day, folded their wings high, and hung headdown among the rafters, and the smell of their droppings was in the empty houses.

And the mice moved in and stored weed seeds in corners, in boxes, in the backs of drawers in the kitchens. And weasels came in to hunt the mice, and the brown owls flew shrieking in and out again.

Now there came a little shower. The weeds sprang up in front of the doorstep, where they had not been allowed, and grass grew up through the porch boards. … The wild cats crept in from the fields at night, but did not mew at the door-step any more. They moved like shadows of a cloud across the moon, into the rooms to hunt the mice.

This life force, which manifests itself in getting the turtle across the road and in creating a new biological community around the abandoned houses, lies also in the nature of man. And because man can abstract and conceptualize, that force is present in him not only in his instinct for physical survival, but also as projected in his gregariousness and social constructs. Thus, despite the fact that the anonymous truck driver in chapter two, a not particularly likable person, is forbidden to carry riders, and may lose his very valuable job for doing so, it is his need for human contact as well as his need of being a “good guy” that prompts him to give Tom Joad a ride: “Fella says once that truck skinners eats all the time. … Sure they stop, but it ain't to eat. They ain't hardly ever hungry. They're just goddamn sick of goin'—get sick of it. Joints is the only place you can pull up, an' when you stop you got to buy somepin' so you can sling the bull with the broad behind the counter.”

Even Tom Joad, who comes into the novel aggressively independent, not only recollects how a fellow inmate at prison who had been paroled came back to prison because it made him feel “lonesome out there,” but admits to the same desire for human community in himself. “‘The guy's right too,’ he said. ‘Las' night, thinkin' where I'm gonna sleep, I got scared. An' I got thinkin' about my bunk, an' I wonder what the stir-bug I got for a cell mate is doin'. Me an' some guys had a strang band goin'. Good one. Guy said we ought to go on the radio. An' this mornin' I didn' know what time to get up. Jus' laid there waitin' for the bell to go off.’” Casy understands this need of man for community. When he tells Tom, “They's an army of us without no harness. … All along I seen it. … Everplace we stopped I seen it. Folks hungry for sidemeat, an' when they get it they ain't fed,” he is saying in his own words that man cannot live by bread alone, that it takes more than a full stomach to make man happy. In one of the interchapters the choric voice defines in communal terms this “harness” which man needs:

The last clear definite function of man—muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need—this is man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself [note he does not say himself], and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam. … For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his accomplishments. … Fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

It is this inherent feeling of “Manself,” to use Steinbeck's term, which forges the link of community, making out of all the scattered, lonely individuals a huge and irresistible “WE.”

Further, in The Grapes of Wrath these seemingly inherent biological drives toward community are supported and given authority through a continuum of historical and religious reference. The Joads trace their ancestry back to the colonization of the new world: “We're Joads,” says Ma. “We don't look up to nobody. Grampa's grampa, he fit in the Revolution.” Looking into the terrible desert which they are about to cross, Al exclaims, “Jesus, what a place. How'd you like to walk across her?” “People done it,” says Tom. “Lots a people done it; an' if they could, we could.” “Lots must a died,” says Al. “Well,” replies Tom, “we ain't come out exactly clean.” As she consoles Tom for the necessity of suffering insults meekly (when they are stopped by vigilantes at the roadblock), Ma Joad repeats again this sense of being supported by participation in a historical community: “You got to have patience. Why, Tom—us people will go on living when all them people is gone. Why, we're the people—we go on.” And one of these phrases, “We're the people,” strikes echoes answered in Psalm 95: “For He is our God; and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand,” thus giving the Joads community with the “chosen people.”

The details which further this association are so numerous and have been pointed out by scholars so frequently as to need little discussion here. Briefly, the twelve Joads are the twelve tribes of Judea; they suffer oppression in Oklahoma (Egypt) under the banks (Pharaohs); undertake an exodus; and arrive in California (Canaan, the land of milk and honey) to be received with hostility by the native peoples. The novel's title, through “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” alludes to Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, and Revelation, as for example “And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God.” In some of the interchapters the strong echoes of the King James Old Testament poetically identify the evils of the present with those decried and lamented by the Prophets:

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the river and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

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.

As the numerous allusions and parallels to the Old Testament establish a historical community between the oppressed migrants and the Israelites, the even more numerous allusions and parallels to the New Testament establish a religious community in Christianity. Again, the evidence is so extensive and has been so thoroughly analyzed elsewhere that little discussion is needed here. The most important of these elements is the itinerant preacher, who has lately left off preaching. Beginning with his initials, J. C.; his rebellion against the old religion; his time of meditation in the wilderness; his announcement of the new religion; his taking on his head the sins of others; to his persecution and death crying out, “You don' know what you're doin'”; Jim Casy is clearly a modern Christ figure. The new messiah arrives in a rich context of traditional Christian symbology, and his message, like that of Christ, is one that considerably broadens man's sense of spiritual community.

It rejects theological notions of sin (“There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.”); it defines the religious impulse as human love (“What's this call, this sperit? … It's love.”); and it identifies the Holy Spirit as all men, the human spirit (“Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of.”). Later in the novel, Casy becomes bolder and extends this community beyond man—“All that lives is holy”—and finally embraces even the inorganic world—“There was the hills, an' there was me, an' we wasn't separate no more. We was one thing. An' that one thing was holy.” His disciple, Tom Joad, repeats Casy's notion of an Oversoul, and immediately quotes from Ecclesiastes to further support the notion of community: “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lif' up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up.” When his mother expresses fear that they may kill him, he replies, “Then it don' matter. Then I'll be ever'where—wherever you look. Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. … I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready.” As another said before him, “Behold, I am always with you.”

These forces for community which Steinbeck presents in the novel—biological, social, historical, religious—are impressive for their strength and variety, manifesting themselves in a range from the physical functions of unthinking organisms to the efflux of divine spirit. But in The Grapes of Wrath we do not see the realization of utopian community, for there are anticommunity forces as well; and these, too, are strong and manifest themselves in a wide range. Even the religious impulse, which in Casy and Tom is a positive force, can be a negative one, a perversion of its real purpose. Thus Uncle John's sense of personal sin isolates him from his fellowman and drives him to debauchery and a further sense of sin and isolation. Religion is seen as an isolating force also in the fanatic Mrs. Sandry, who frightens Rosasharn with her descriptions of the horrible penalties God visits on pregnant women who see plays, or does “clutch-an-hug dancin',” seeing these as the causes of miscarriage and malformation, rather than disease and malnutrition, as Satan, in the guise of the camp manager, claims. The greatest practical realization of community in the novel is the government camp at Weedpatch, especially the dance. Despite the strong forces against them the people foil attempts to instigate a fight which will give the corrupt police the power to break up the camp. It is important, therefore, that during the dance the religious fanatics are seen as separate: “In front of their tents the Jesus-lovers sat and watched, their faces hard and contemptuous. They did not speak to one another, they watched for sin, and their faces condemned the whole proceeding.”

Back at the other end of the scale, we see anticommunity forces at work also on the biological level of sheer survival. It is not greed or hatred or even ignorance that makes Willy drive one of the destroying tractors: “I got two little kids,” he says. “I got a wife an' my wife's mother. Them people got to eat. Fust an' on'y thing I got to think about is my own folks.” But Muley notes what is behind the bluster: “Seems like he's shamed, so he gets mad.” Mr. Thomas, the owner of a small orchard who is pressured by the Farmers Association to lower his wages, is also doing what he is ashamed of in order to survive, and he too speaks “irritably” and becomes gruff. Near the end of the novel, Ma Joad sees through the glib gibes of the pathetic little clerk in the expensive company store: “Doin' a dirty thing like this. Shames ya, don't it? Got to act flip, huh?” Whether or not the used-car salesmen overcharging for their jalopies also feel shame we do not learn. But clearly these people, as well as many others in the novel, are working against community because of the need for individual survival. Perhaps that is one of the significances of those calm little descriptions of predatory activity in nature which are found throughout the novel. Immediately preceding the car salesmen, for example, we have this: “gradually the skittering life of the ground, of holes and burrows, of the brush, began again; the gophers moved, and the rabbits crept to green things, the mice scampered over clods, and the winged hunters moved soundlessly overhead.”

Sometimes the instinct of mere survival shades into selfishness and greed, as when the large owners squeeze out the little people and pay far lower wages than they can afford. It is interesting of Steinbeck's method that selfishness as an anticommunity drive, absolutely apart from any necessity for survival, receives its barest treatment in an episode involving the Joads themselves, the children. At the government camp, Ruthie breaks into a peaceful, established croquet game, unwilling to wait her turn. Insisting, “I wanta play now,” she wrestles a mallet from a player. The actions of the other children are interesting. Under the guidance of the supervisor, they simply abandon the game to her, refusing community so to speak, leaving her alone and ridiculous on the court until she runs away in tears.

A third anticommunity force is the result of still another step beyond mere survival—the creation of a system, a machine, a monster, which seems to have a life of its own. Steinbeck presents it in a hypothetical choric dialogue:

We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't like a man.

Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

No, you're wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in the bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.

But a monster need not be a bank. It may be “an owner with fifty-thousand acres,” or it may be the entire economic structure itself which works against community: “Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten … the works of the roots of the vines, of the trees must be destroyed to keep up the price. … And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.”

In the light of certain cliches about the social message in Steinbeck's supposedly “revolutionary” novel, it is interesting that these concepts of the “monster” and of a backward religion are only two of several anticommunity forces, and that the rest lie not in social structures but in man's own nature or individuality, as with the forces toward survival and selfishness discussed above and the forces of suspicion and ignorance. It is distrust that makes the transport company place a “No Riders” sign on the windshield of its trucks. It is a suspiciousness learned in jail that makes Tom, before his conversion, say for the second time, “I'm just puttin' one foot in front a the other,” and again in a few pages, “I ruther jus' lay one foot down in front a the other.” He doesn't trust people enough to extend himself. So deeply engrained is this suspicion that even at the government camp he is immediately suspicious of the “committee” which he is told will visit them tomorrow, and Pa Joad is openly hostile toward the camp manager's visit, although both occasions are friendly and helpful. Casy tells the story of the organizer who got a union started to help the workers: “An' know what? Them very folks he been tryin' to help tossed him out. Wouldn' have nothin' to do with 'im. Scared they'd get saw in his company. Says, ‘Git out. You're a danger on us.’”

Along with suspicion and distrust is ignorance. There is the simple ignorance of the hired tractor driver who perhaps lives twenty miles away in town and needs not come back to his tractor for weeks or months:

And this is easy and efficient. So easy that the wonder goes out of work, so efficient that the wonder goes out of land and the working of it, and with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation. And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation. For nitrates are not the land, not phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all of these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man driving a dead tractor on land that he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.

A more complex aspect of ignorance as a force against community appears in the interchapters, most clearly in that chapter wherein migrants are forced to sell their household goods to profiteers who take advantage of their need in order to pay very little for honest goods, and who are addressed by the choric voice: “you're buying bitterness. Buying a plow to plow your own children under, buying the arms and spirits that might have saved you. Five dollars, not four. I can't haul them back—Well, take 'em for four. But I warn you, you're buying what will plow your own children under. And you won't see. You can't see. … But watch it, mister. There's a premium goes with this pile of junk and the bay horses—so beautiful—a packet of bitterness to grow in your house and to flower some day. 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.” Perhaps no other passage in the novel carries so convincingly this great truth of human community, that no man is an island, that what you do unto the least of these you do unto me. The tenor of all these forces of ignorance against community is, of course, in Casy's dying words, an echo of Christ's own words—“You don' know what you're doin'.”

Because it is not theological or sociological determinism, but ignorance breeding selfishness and distrust, that is so largely responsible for the forces against community, it follows that the establishment of the new community will come out of true knowledge, out of which in turn will come love and sharing. It is Casy, the spiritual leader, who first abandons the old ways and becomes a seeker for new truth. When he first appears he has already abandoned his conventional notions of sin, hellfire, and the salvation of individual souls for the doctrine of universal love and the transcendental Oversoul. He asks to go along with the Joads because he wants to learn more: “I'm gonna work in the fiel's, in the green fiel's, an' I'm gonna try to learn. Gonna learn why the folks walks in the grass, gonna hear 'em talk, gonna hear 'em sing. Gonna listen to kids eatin' mush. Gonna hear husban' an' wife poundin' the mattress in the night. Gonna eat with 'em an' learn.” What he finally learns, in jail after giving himself up to save Tom and Floyd, is that man's spiritual unity must express itself in a social unity, which is why he becomes an organizer. The grace which he reluctantly gives over his first breakfast with the Joads is already groping in this direction: “I got to thinkin' how we was holy when we was one thing, an' mankin' was holy when it was one thing. An' it on'y got unholy when one mis'able little fella got the bit in his teeth an' run off his own way, kickin' an' draggin' an' fightin'. Fella like that bust the holiness. But when they're all workin' together, not one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of harnessed to the whole shebang—that's right, that's holy.”

It is this growing knowledge of the necessity of sharing with strangers far beyond the usual circle of family and friends that becomes the most powerful force for establishing the new community. The novel's action opens with a series of acts of sharing. The truck driver shares a ride, Tom offers to share his whiskey with him and does share it with Casy. Muley not only shares his rabbits, but makes the first statement of this new principle: “‘I ain't got no choice of the matter.’ He stopped on the ungracious sound of his words. ‘That ain't like I mean it. That ain't. I mean’—he stumbled—‘what I mean, if a fella's got somepin' to eat an' another fella's hungry—why, the first fella ain't got no choice. I mean, s'pose I pick up my rabbits an' go off somewheres an' eat 'em. See?’” To this is added Mrs. Wilson's answer to Ma Joad's thanks for help: “People needs—to help.” Just a few pages later Ma Joad, in replying to Mrs. Wilson's thanks for help, gives the concept a further turn: “you can't let help go unwanted.” It is significant that the first example of spontaneous sharing with strangers on the journey is a symbolic merging of two families: Grampa's death in the Wilson's tent, his burial in one of the Wilson's blankets with a page torn from the Wilson's bible, and Ma Joad's promise to care for Mrs. Wilson. As Pa Joad expresses it later, “We almost got a kin bond.” And Ma Joad, who starts off with a ferocious defense of her family against all comers—“All we got is the fambly”—four hundred pages later says, “Use' ta be the fambly was fust. It ain't so now. It's anybody. Worse off we get, the more we got to do.” Her progress is charted by the numerous occasions for sharing which are described in the novel—their past, their knowledge, their food and hunger, gasoline, transportation, shelter, work, talent, joy and sorrow.

The narrative is saturated with the particulars of this sharing, and it is in the choric voice of the interchapter: “And because they were lonely and perplexed … they huddled together; they talked together; they shared their lives, their food, and the things they hoped for in the new country. … In the evening twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the west was one dream.” It is this sharing that creates the unity, the change from “I” to “We,” the new sense of community through which the people survive. And those who do not share, who continue selfish and distrustful, “the companies, the banks worked at their own doom and they did not know it.”

The more one reads The Grapes of Wrath, the more thoroughly one knows the many ramifications of its informing theme, the more perfect and moving seems the novel's ending. Here, in this one real and symbolic act everything is brought together. Rosasharn gives her milk out of biological necessity to do so; she feeds not her own baby but an old man, a stranger. The Rose of Sharon, Christ, offers his body in communion. Biology, sociology, history, and religion become one expression of the community of mankind.