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Examples Of Machinery In The Grapes Of Wrath

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Examples Of Machinery In The Grapes Of Wrath
Machinery vs. Human characteristics Humans and machinery have one major difference that sets them apart: emotions. Machines don’t feel emotions the way humans do , or have characteristics like humans. In chapter 5 of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath, Steinbeck is portraying a land owner giving the bad news to a tenant farmer that he is being kicked off his land, who does not take it lightly. Throughout the chapter , Steinbeck is depicting the idea that machinery is void of all human characteristics and emotions. As humans becomes less powerful in the time period of Steinbecks novel , machinery is taking over their jobs. “The tenant system won’t work anymore. One man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen families. Pay …show more content…
Machinery and technology are new advances society has yet to control oneself around. After the news came to the tenant farmer that his family would be kicked off their farm, the man who now took place of all the old farming families came to plow with his tractor. He was an old farmer of the land , who now was receiving three dollars a day to plow with the tractor. The man has no emotion toward his neighbors , he only spoke the words that he needed to feed his kids. When the man was given the opportunity to get pulled out of the failing farming market , he jumped at the chance. He had no control over what would be a better decision for his ex-fellow tenant farmers, for he would be plowing over their homes soon. The machinery got the farmer by the throat and tricked him into thinking he would be better off . Society often gets sucked into this fake world of technologies and machinery where we believe it’s all real and almost like a human life , but it’s not. “We all got to figure. There’s some way to stop this. It’s not like lightening or earthquakes. We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change.” (Steinbeck 38) Men created the machinery that is potentially ruining the lives of hundreds of farmers, but the machinery is no longer run by men. Men lost control when the technologies became too powerful and society demanded more out of the creators. Machinery has no soul , or heart like a man does but it can still take control of people and situations due to the pure strength of it. Not like a natural disaster , machinery that men created take a lot more fight to take

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