From Conflict to Identity: Main Issues Explored in US Literary Education - Sykalo Eugen 2023

How does John Steinbeck depict the harsh realities of poverty and inequality in “The Grapes of Wrath”?

The Grapes of Wrath and the Dust-Caked Fantasy of “Working Hard”

Here’s the thing about The Grapes of Wrath: it doesn’t care whether you’re tired of hearing about the American Dream. It’s not here to quote Langston Hughes or flex its proletariat prose. It just throws you, face-first, into dirt—literal and moral—and then dares you to feel something.

And I did. I mean, I felt angry. Sick. Strangely numb. Like I’d been scraped raw by someone who didn’t bother to whisper “it’s for your own good.” John Steinbeck, apparently, doesn’t do trigger warnings. What he does is map the slow degradation of dignity with the precision of a surgeon and the rage of a man who’s watched too many people get stepped on, chewed up, spat out, forgotten.

Let’s talk poverty. Not the abstract concept. Not poverty as “systemic issue” in a Twitter thread with seven think tank links and an infographic. I mean the crawling, skin-deep, breath-by-breath erosion of what it means to be human when you have nothing—when you become illegal for needing to eat. When the very idea of rest feels criminal. That’s the kind of poverty Steinbeck slaps across your face.

The Joads? They’re not tragic. They’re terrifying. Not because they do anything particularly monstrous—Ma Joad is a lowkey icon of survivalist maternal energy—but because you realize, somewhere around the halfway mark, that the system isn’t failing them. It was built without them. It’s working exactly as designed.

And if that sounds like something you’ve heard on a podcast this week, good. Because what Steinbeck was whisper-screaming back in 1939 was a prelude to what every overworked, underpaid, debt-strangled gig worker knows now: the floor is always lava when you’re poor, and the ceiling? It’s actually just the underside of someone else’s yacht.

One of the things that makes The Grapes of Wrath so brutally effective is how boring it sometimes feels. Not in the sense of "I want to DNF this and go rewatch Fleabag"—but boring like life is boring when you’re poor and trying not to die. You wait. You fail. You hope. You get humiliated. You keep going. Repeat.

The slow pacing isn’t a flaw. It’s the point. It mimics the plodding, exhausting loop of survival. Waiting for work that never comes. Looking for shelter that isn't infested or burning down. Watching your child starve while people two miles down the road are pouring milk into gutters because—capitalism.

Let’s pause there.

Because I genuinely almost threw the book when Steinbeck described how farmers destroyed food to keep prices high while literal children were dying of malnutrition. They dumped oranges in ditches and poured kerosene over them so no one could eat. They let pigs rot in acid.

This isn’t dystopia. It’s not speculative fiction. It’s California. In the 1930s. And it’s depressingly recognizable.

We live in an era where a bag of Cheetos has gone from $1.29 to $2.99 in the span of six months, and yet people are still called “lazy” for skipping breakfast. Where “food deserts” exist in places with five McDonald’s but no affordable groceries. Where farmers today are still being asked to kill off surplus crops or animals for profit reasons.

So when Steinbeck writes that “there is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation,” he’s not trying to sound poetic. He’s stating a fact.

And the language—oh my God, the language. If you’re looking for minimalist realism or something sleek and Hemingway-ish, you’re going to be absolutely gutted by Steinbeck’s excess. He writes like he’s pulling dead things from the earth and handing them to you, bleeding. He will beat a metaphor until it breaks open and leaks out into the next page. He wants you inside the dirt, tasting it. Feeling it in your teeth.

Take the intercalary chapters—the weird little in-between bits where the narrative zooms out to show the big picture. These aren’t plot; they’re thesis. Prophecy. Sermon. And they pulse with this furious, almost Biblical energy. Like, yes, here’s a turtle crossing the road—but also here’s America, crawling slowly toward either redemption or collapse.

This isn't just literature. It’s protest. It's mood. It's someone lighting a match and daring you to look away.

Let’s not get cute about inequality, either. The Grapes of Wrath is not subtle about whose boots are on whose necks. The banks are not people. The cops are not heroes. The landowners are not misunderstood businessmen. Steinbeck is not here to negotiate your delicate free-market feelings.

Capitalism, in this book, is a machine made of people who’ve forgotten they have bodies. They only have ledgers. Spreadsheets. Orders. It’s them who become dehumanized, not the poor. Because poverty doesn’t make you less human—it just makes you a liability to those who hoard power.

What really cracked me open, though, was the contrast between the Joads and the people who exploit them. The Joads, for all their exhaustion and despair, are still trying to be good. To each other. To strangers. They share food they don’t have. They bury their dead with dignity. Even when they’re reduced to animal-like instincts—fleeing, crouching, hiding—they never lose this kernel of decency.

Meanwhile, the ones with resources are scared. Of what? That the hungry might knock. That the laborers might organize. That the bottom might rise up and demand a floor. The rich live in terror of fairness.

You see it in today’s billionaires, too. The ones building bunkers in New Zealand. The ones who fly private to talk about climate change. The ones who treat “minimum wage” like it’s some kind of communist death cult. They’re not afraid of poverty. They’re afraid of equality.

And that’s the real horror Steinbeck lays bare: that the system we live in doesn’t fear collapse—it fears justice.

I don’t love everything about this book. Some characters drift into caricature. The religious overtones get a bit messianic (Jim Casy is a Christ figure, I get it, please stop yelling). And I’m still not over that breast-feeding scene at the end. It’s powerful, sure, but also—what? Like, is this maternal redemption or just a last-ditch shock tactic? The ending feels like someone whispering “hope” while the house burns down.

But maybe that’s the point. Steinbeck doesn’t do clean resolutions. There's no payoff. No climactic takedown of the bad guys. No revolution. Just a family stuck in an ever-worsening loop of drought, labor camps, and invisible power.

That’s what makes this novel feel modern, in a bleak way. There’s no satisfying catharsis. Just the aching recognition that this—this stretch of human cruelty wearing a suit and tie—is not an anomaly. It’s structure.

Sometimes people ask why we still read stuff like The Grapes of Wrath. Why assign this to high schoolers. Why put them through 600 pages of misery and dust.

Here’s why: because it teaches you to see the difference between misfortune and injustice.

Misfortune is a storm. Injustice is someone holding an umbrella and choosing not to share it. Steinbeck knew the difference. That’s why his prose still cuts. Why this book still lingers in your lungs like ash.

And if you're reading it now—under a $60,000 student loan, or while your landlord hikes rent again, or after seeing another GoFundMe to cover insulin—you’re probably already living it.

So no, The Grapes of Wrath isn’t comforting. It doesn’t hug you. It slaps you awake.

And in a country that still thinks bootstraps are a plan, we need that slap. We need it bad.