This book had the most depressing tone of any book I have ever read, ever. Have I already blogged about that? If so, the tone is so miserable that it deserves two blogs. Maybe the tone is not entirely to blame, as the events in the novel are bad enough to make one treasure their family to the end of their life. However, a bad outlook always makes thing look worse.
The book even starts with rather depressing language. It talks of the slow yet violent destruction of the land people needed to survive. Passages such as the following are representative of the entire book’s style when narrating: “Little by little the sky was darkened by the mixing dust, and the wind felt over the earth, loosened the dust, and carried it away. The wind grew stronger. The rain crust broke and the dust lifted up out of the fields and drove gray plumes into the air like sluggish smoke (Steinbeck 3).” It is dry and cold. It sounds like someone it simply explaining that the land was blowing away, but that someone had was somehow able to express the people’s pain as well. It is not a happy thing to read. Every time the author narrates the state of the whole region, he uses the same style.
When the characters talk, the author uses the dialect people from that region used. It makes the characters seem more realistic and personal because it is not narrated in any sort of dialect. Because of this, when bad things happen to the characters, the reader actually feels bad for them.
The style of this book is most of what made it so memorable and effective. If the reader had not felt the sympathy the author was trying to make the reader feel, his point about how the workers were exploited would not have made any difference. I guess it was important that the style be so utterly depressing, but I can not say that I enjoyed it.
This book had the most depressing tone of any book I have ever read, ever. Have I already blogged about that? If so, the tone is so miserable that it deserves two blogs. Maybe the tone is not entirely to blame, as the events in the novel are bad enough to make one treasure their family to the end of their life. However, a bad outlook always makes thing look worse.
The book even starts with rather depressing language. It talks of the slow yet violent destruction of the land people needed to survive. Passages such as the following are representative of the entire book’s style when narrating: “Little by little the sky was darkened by the mixing dust, and the wind felt over the earth, loosened the dust, and carried it away. The wind grew stronger. The rain crust broke and the dust lifted up out of the fields and drove gray plumes into the air like sluggish smoke (Steinbeck 3).” It is dry and cold. It sounds like someone it simply explaining that the land was blowing away, but that someone had was somehow able to express the people’s pain as well. It is not a happy thing to read. Every time the author narrates the state of the whole region, he uses the same style.
When the characters talk, the author uses the dialect people from that region used. It makes the characters seem more realistic and personal because it is not narrated in any sort of dialect. Because of this, when bad things happen to the characters, the reader actually feels bad for them.
The style of this book is most of what made it so memorable and effective. If the reader had not felt the sympathy the author was trying to make the reader feel, his point about how the workers were exploited would not have made any difference. I guess it was important that the style be so utterly depressing, but I can not say that I enjoyed it.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print.
Good job identifying the importance of dialect in the novel
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