deserts essays

deserts essays To look at the novel as a whole, it is a very well-written piece, which draws out the theme quite simply to the reader. The theme being the shift from individual thinking to wide-spread thinking. This shift is most directly seen in the actions of Tom Joad. In the opening of the novel, he is mainly concerned for his own welfare. He wants to make up for all the things he missed when in prison. Later on in the novel, he is more concerned with the welfare of the family. At the end of the novel, he has shifted to trying to do what is best for all the migrant people by trying to organize them even though he knows this involves him in great personal danger. That shift in thinking is also accompanied with the replacement of the individual family by the world family. The thing that started the breakup of the individual family was the loss of their land. The family had lived there for many generations and had strong ties to the land. Getting thrown off the land was like losing their family history. The same concern for humanity at large is seen in Ma Joad. At first, she is concerned with keeping the family together. But, as the novel progresses, she begins to become a part of a larger human family. As she says at the end of the novel, at first, it was the family and now it is just anyone who needs help. Next, Grampa Joad died because he could not take leaving his home. He is the first family member to leave. However, it would seem that, as Peter Lisca points out, Grampa is "symbolically present through the anonymous old man in the barn (stable), who is saved from starvation by Rose of Sharon's breasts..." At the same time th ough, the family's joining with the Wilsons shows that the larger world family of the migrant society is replacing the individual family. Chapter Seventeen is one of the general chapters that shows the growth of the new migrant society that has its own laws and leaders. At the border of California, ...