Grapes of Wrath Theme Essay

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In the novel, The Grapes Of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, the land is often seized from farmers because they cannot afford to keep it due to a bad harvest season. The land is seized because of the Great Depression. The dirt has all of its nutrients stripped away because of the Dust Bowl, making it difficult for the farmers to harvest valuable crops to pay rent to their landowners. Losing the land makes the farmers depressed and desperate for the emotion the land brought them because they are emotionally attached to it since they have built their lives and families off of it even though they rent it. When the land lets farmers down, by not producing much crop because of conditions, they get disappointed as their land gets taken away, but farmers still lust to have an emotional attachment with the land. In The Grapes of Wrath, many families toiled their way across the United States to find work and a new life for their struggling family. Many of those families were particularly farmers because with a bad harvest they couldn’t afford to pay rent for the land that their farms and houses were. As an effect of this, they had to go search for a new homestead and leave behind what helped them build their lives. In the novel, it describes what it was like having the land taken away from the farmers: “The squatting tenant men nodded and wondered and drew fingers in the dust, and yes, they knew, God knows. If the dust only wouldn’t fly. If the top would only stay on the soil, it might not be so bad… The squatting men raised their eyes to understand. Can’t we just hang on? Maybe the next year will be a good year… What do you want us to do? We can’t take less share of the crop-- we’re half starved right now. The kids are hungry all the time. We got no clothes, torn an’ ragged.” (John Steinbeck, 41-42). This symbolizes what significance the land has to the farmers because when
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