The Grapes of Wrath In-Class Essay

Migrant workers have been stopping at many cafés along route 66 because of their journey west to California. Thus introducing a new breed of customer, so to speak, compared to the normal truck drivers and tourists at these cafés. One of these cafés has two workers named Mae, the waitress, and Al, the cook. Mae and Al are greedy and money loving Americans who only think about themselves. They are the Americans that only think about how much money they can make in their current situation. Americans think of money as an ideal because money is something that they must have to survive and keep everything in their life running. In The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Mae and Al only help those who are less fortunate than their other customers for their own profit.
During the period that this book is set, there are many economical hardships going on. There is the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and a huge amount of “oakies” moving to California looking for jobs. In desperate times there are desperate measures that need to be taken including risking one’s family to go get work even if that means traveling across the whole country. Well, each problem has causes and these problems causes are well said in The Grapes of Wrath, “The causes lie deep and simply—the causes are a hunger in a stomach, multiplied a million times; a hunger in a single soul, hunger for joy and work, to create, multiplied a million times” (150). This is a struggle for everyone.
This struggle is affecting a mass amount of people. This is not a small problem; this is a national problem. This struggle is making people depend on themselves instead of depending on each other for the help and support that they need from each other, “One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west” (151). This quote is basically explaining how people are alone in this and on their own. The Dust Bowl caused a lot of stress on the farmers and people causing them to move away from their farms and when they did go outside they had to take desperate measures, “Men and women huddled in their houses, and they tied handkerchiefs over their noses when they went out, and wore goggles to protect their eyes” (3).
Throughout the book, there are people who take advantage of them, not in a good way either. Some people might claim that when people are in a financial dip, they will go any distance to get their money even if it is taking advantage of people who need to get money or whatever it is more than the person who is giving them the money or selling them something to help them along the way. For example, the car salesmen said “’Take out that yard battery before you make delivery. Put in that dumb cell” (62). The car salesmen purposefully gave a bad battery after the people went to check the car out. They were ripping people off to the extreme. Since most people were buying cars to get to California or else where in the west and people knew that, the people like the car salesmen wanted to take advantage of the fact that their product was in high demand and sell them with a bad battery or something else wrong with it. Another example would be the pawnbrokers. A family moving west needs to get rid of most of their personal belongings because they cannot carry much in their cars since they did not have
Hummers and other huge SUVs back then. The pawnbrokers would give them an amount that was far less than what the family paid for it. For example, “That seeder cost 38 dollars. 2 dollars is not enough” (86) the family paid 38 dollars for this seeder that they are trying to sell to this pawnbroker, but the pawnbroker will only give them two dollars for it. There are neighbors turning on each other and their friends. An example of this would be “’Nearly 100 people on the road for your 3 dollars. Where will we go?’” (37). Neighbors, pawnbrokers, and car salesmen all taking advantage of these people who are just trying to get out of there and go to California.
On the road, the families need to stop at cafés for food. Mae and Al, workers at one of the many cafés, purposefully make a huge scene about the loaf of bread to get attention. Instead of just saying, “No we cannot do that, sorry.” Mae goes of for a while about how she will not sell the bread for ten cents, usually the bread would cost fifteen cents, but the father offers to buy ten cents worth of the loaf, so he would not be ripping the people off, yet Mae still refuses and goes on about how they could buy other things on the menu that have bread included like sandwiches. After she is supposedly nice to the boys and gives them candy and the bread at a discounted rate, she calls them “shitheels” behind their back. Al, on the other hand, tracks the slot machine, figures out when it will pay off, and goes to win the money when he knew it was about to pay off. These people, Mae and Al, are rude, greedy, and con artists who want money and that is all they care about.
During these challenging times, people are forced to take car of themselves and their family. When resources are slim, there is a struggle to have control over those
resources. Sadly, these times can bring out the worst in humanity. These factors contribute to the hardships that the migrant workers had to face with the car salesmen, pawnbrokers, their neighbors turning on them, the Dust bowl, the Great Depression, Mae and Al, and everything else that happened in this period of time. The example of Al and Mae manipulating others for their own personal gain of money highlights all of these factors.
Work Cited
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Print.