The Grapes of Wrath: The Purpose of the Interchapters
Initially, I found the interchapters to be annoying interruptions to the story. It was only when I realized the point in having the interchapters that I understood that they not only did not interrupt the story, but they also added to it tremendously. The interchapters provide indirect comments or general situations that suggest something about the personal tragedies of the main characters. These comments and situations help give the reader an understanding of what the characters are going through by either showing metaphorically their present or future triumphs and struggles or explaining the history of the period in which they lived.
Chapter three is an interchapter. It describes a concrete highway that a land turtle struggled to cross. The turtle was finally almost there when it was hit by a truck, and its shell was chipped. It was thrown on its back and had to struggle even harder, but it did get going again.
This chapter represents the continual struggle that the Joads would have to face throughout the entire story. Throughout the novel, the Joads meet many hardships. They are forced to leave their home, lose family members such as the grandparents and Noah, work for low wages, and suffer from hunger, floods, and cruel prejudices in California. But, just as the turtle refused to be swayed from his purpose, so will the Joads. Chapter five is an interchapter that discusses tractors hired by banks or corporations that would come to the land and plow through it, destroying everything in their path. The chapter is an abstract conflict between the tenant farmer and the banks and shows the pain of a tenant farmer upon leaving the land that was settled by their grandfather.
The tenant farmer was so upset that he threatened to shoot the driver. Another chapter describes a tenant farmer who has to leave and is cheated into paying too much for a car. Chapter nine describes the families who must sell their sentimental goods at absurdly low prices. These chapters present the situations that the Joads come across very soon.
The Joads have to leave their land and sell all their things. Pa dreads telling Ma the price he sold their things for in chapter ten. Grandpa threatens to kill the tractor driver who was plowing their land, just like the tenant farmer Steinbeck described. The Joads had to buy a used car to go to California.
The interchapters provide general social situations which the Joads had to face. Interchapters nineteen and twenty-one discuss the development of land ownership in California. Chapter nineteen explains how the Americans took California from the Mexicans and how people known as squatters” acquired lots of land and thought of it as their own. They hired people to work the land and became great owners. The problem was that many people from Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas began to arrive, and the owners didn’t want them to become “squatters,” so they hated them and called them “Okies.” These owners cut wages to pay policemen to guard and protect their property.
In the next chapter, the Joads are called Okies, and a young man explains to Tom that people are afraid the Okies will get organized if they stay in one place for too long, so they push them around. This man also explains how no one can get people together to organize because the cops will arrest whoever starts up. Chapter twenty-one describes how people with small jobs in California are afraid of the Okies because they don’t want to lose their jobs. The big companies could make wages very low because people were starving and would work for low wages. The following chapter explains how Tom met Timothy Wallace, who told him that he would only have his job for a couple of days, and his wages were being cut. The interchapters describe general situations, and the chapters after them explain how that particular situation affects or will affect the Joads.
The reader can learn many details about the hardships that the Joads went through by reading about the hardships of the migrant workers as a whole. Certain metaphors, like the turtle, that Steinbeck used in the interchapters can teach us about the nature and struggle of the Joads throughout the novel.
