Grapes Of Wrath Chapter Analysis

The Grapes of Wrath is filled with many intercalary chapters that I feel benefit the novel in many different ways. These chapters help develop major themes throughout the novel; one being people's harsh actions towards one another. In chapter seven, an intercalary chapter about an awful cars salesmen who rips off everyone, it justifies this theme very well. The salesman would sell beat up cars with missing parts to farmers who did not know any better. “Take out that yard battery before you make delievery” (p 85). They would even purposely remove parts so that they could make more money in the long run. Without intercalary chapters like this, the novel's theme would not be as developed as it is. These intercalary chapters add so much detail within the novel which help the reader understand more about what is happening in the other chapters as well. In chapters 12, 14 and 15 Steinbeck describes how harshly people treat one another
The way that the intercalary chapters always seemed to fit in with what was happening in the story changes the dynamics of the novel entirely. The intercalary chapters always had matching themes and messages with the other chapters throughout the entire novel which helped pull it together. With the story itself it helped the reader understand the storyline so much better by providing background information about that time period. For example, in chapter 19 it describes how the migrants were hated for coming to California. “And they had hoped to find a home, and they found only hatred”(p.318). Then in the following chapter the Joad family experiences a problem with men trying to keep them out of California because they hate migrants. These kind of technical decisions really helped pull the novel together. I believe that these intercalary chapters benefitted the novel greatly and are very useful for the