FREE ESSAY ON GRAPES OF WRATH/SOUND AND FURY

GRAPES OF WRATH/SOUND AND FURY

Throughout history, many devastating economic, social, and environmental changes have
occurred causing people to rise and overcome immense odds. In the 1930s, The Great
Depression and the Dustbowl Disaster, a drought with horrific dust storms turning
once-fertile agricultural lands of mid-America into virtual wastelands, forced thousands
of destitute farmers to pack their families and belongings into their cars in search of
agricultural work in central California. Years of degradation stemming from the end of
slavery beginning at the conclusion of the Civil War destructed the old southern
aristocratic families. These different external influences impact on the characters is
seen in John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath, and William Faulkner's novel, The
Sound and the Fury. Steinbeck illustrates and advocates drastic external changes in the
economy and life style of the downtrodden migrants, as he follows the Joad family from
Oklahoma to California. Faulkner depicts the decline of the aristocratic south through
the eyes of the Compson children.
The external changes, The Great Depression and the Dustbowl, affected the Joads
economically and emotionally. By economic standards the Joads were poor before the Dust
Bowl. However, they believed they had economic value and importance by working their own
40 acres of land. "Grampa took up the land, and he had to kill the Indians and drive them
away. And Pa was born here… Then a bad year came and he had to borrow a little
money. An' we was born here. And Pa had to borrow money. The bank owned the land then,
but we stayed and we got a little bit of what we raised"(Steinbeck 45). Losing the farm,
being forced to leave their home in a search of work, meant the loss of their social
values. To the Joads, value and life importance rest in working the land and this
ideology of the past made their emotional adjustment to being a wondering, an "Okie,"
even more difficult. The moving, questing people were migrants now. Those families which
had lived on a little piece of land, who had lived and died on forty acres, had now the
whole West to rove in. And they scampered about, looking for work; and the highways were
streams of people, and the ditch banks were lines of people." (Steinbeck 107) Searching
for the feeling of importance and belonging in the ethics they were raised to believe in,
the Joads were unable to derive importance from their present life importance.
Some emotional evolution of the family is shown best by the character Ma. Ma experienced
the greatest change from thinking only of keeping her immediate family together,
accepting that a broken-family will not be able to accomplish anything, to believing in a
social extended family. In the evening a strange thing happened: 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." (Steinbeck 235) The Joad family through their
journey experienced the benefit of people uniting to accomplish goals. Ma said it best
when she said, Use'ta be fambly was fust. It ain't so now. It's anybody. Worse off we get
the more we got to do. (Steinbeck 305) Ma, expressing volunteerism, presents the
transition from thinking of ones self to being concerned for humanity.
One of the main realities of human existence is the constant, unceasing passage of time.
The unstoppable eternal force of time exemplifies the affects of the Civil War on the
aristocracy of the south. Though the novel is mostly about the internal conflicts within
the family, the external events of the time period's influence can be seen through the
character Quentin. Quentin's obsession with the past, which results in his obsession with
the passage of time, is a central theme of not only the Quentin section but of the entire
book. This living in the past ideology is the key to understanding what Faulkner is
trying to say about the decay of Southern culture and traditions. "The watch ticked on. I
turned the face up, the blank dial with little wheels clicking and clicking behind it."
(Faulkner 80) Quentin cannot stop time. Just as the decay of the southern culture cannot
be stopped, and though he does not necessarily correlate the decline of southern
aristocracy as an affect of the Civil War, he does blame it on the evolution of time. He
is totally consumed with the past, and at times can think of nothing else. This inability
to move on with his life leads to a fixation with protecting his sister, Caddy. However
distorted his fixation may be, it stems from the old Southern chivalry views. Slowly
destroying his mentality by his inability to let go of the past, he becomes determined to
stop time itself, an effort that will eventually force him to take his own life. 
The Quentin section best illustrates the social decay of the rich southern families as he
literally destroys himself. The cause of this decay is clearly slavery, but the
implications of this decay are much farther reaching than merely the Southern
aristocracy. Many people believe that slavery instantaneously ended with the Civil War
but this is not correct. The continuing remnants of slavery are observed in the Compson's
primitive black servants. Just as Quentin idealized the past as with a picture of the old
South as a wonderful and glorious place, they romanticize about it and even wish to stop
time in order to return to the past just as much as Quentin. Sadly, like Quentin, their
views of the past and time are terribly distorted with the inability to remember the
horrors of the past that were characterized by Southern slavery, a cancer constantly
decaying the moral and ethical base of the South, 
Many events during the time period a person lives uncontrollably effect a person's life.
This simple fact is portrayed in the novels through their influences on each family. The
members of the family either effectively evolve from the external changes or remain stuck
in the past. As slavery declines the Compson family destructs by their reliance upon
living in the past. However, as the economy and the dust storms worsen the Joad family
changes their social views from "I" to "We," but not their economic life views by leaving
their work at home only to try and find worth in working in California.