Grapes Of Wrath Analysis

There is something mysterious about the reason why people feel the need to look out for one another. In some cases, it is like humans feel a certain obligation of compassion. The Grapes of Wrath encourages this part of human nature. During the Joad’s westbound journey, the characters were held face to face with people who needed help just as much as they did. In this way, John Steinback presents the question: how can we as humans support the livelihood of one another? His answer is that humans must support each other’s livelihood by providing what others are deprived of. In the early chapters of the Grapes of Wrath, John Steinback wasted no time in describing in which way humans can provide for one another. Jim Casey had been roaming the farm lands for quite sometime, a-thinkin’ an’ a-wonderin’ about humans and God. However, over the years he had grown lonely. He
This is when Rose of Sharon gives her breast milk to an old dying man after her own child was a stillborn. All she did was “lay down beside him...loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast” (pg 455). This is a fascinating conclusion to the Grapes of Wrath because this event symbolizes the familial bond of the human race, one of which that increases the responsibility and human obligation of providing for each other. Not only that, but Rose of Sharon is a phrase used in the Song of Solomon in the Bible, “I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys” (Sos 2:1). This book in the Bible refers to the holiness of matrimony and glorifies marital intimacy. This only emphasizes the symbolism of the breastfeeding because holy marital intimacy, in the eyes of the Christian faith, should lead to children, and who gets breastfed, children. The man is getting breastfed, and is therefore reduced to a childlike state. This then makes the image of the human family