Never cold. an'fruit ever'place, an' people just bein' in the nicest places, little white houses in among the orange trees [...] an' the little fellas go out an' pick oranges right off the tree. They ain't gonna be able to stand it, they'll get to yellin' so."(Steinbeck, 95) Their conviction is enhanced by the stories they hear and by false advertisements they are sent. These false advertisements may very well stand for the archetype of contemporary commerce which is dependent on advertisement. California may moreover be a symbol for America itself, which was once seen as a heavenly continent, an unspotted, holy land. Steinbeck thus drafts at once a story of migration and tries to settle and capture the archetypes of the modern world. The story thus focuses on the fall of human life from wholeness into fragmentation: "Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch."(Steinbeck, 128) the Grapes of Wrath portrays thus the dissolving of an entire community but also of a long stage in the history of humanity, and its replacement with new coordinates for life, such as the ones brought by capitalism.
Another story that tackles identity in exile is that of Jyoti/Jasmine / Jane, the main character of Bharati Mukherjee's novel. While Steinbeck's story focused largely on the panorama of a huge change and the migration of an entire community, Mukherjee's story is restricted to life of a few characters, Jasmine being naturally the most important of them. However, the purport of the book is similar to that of Steinbeck: by setting two very different ways of life up against each other, the novel captures history at its crossroads, with identity wavering between the old and the new. The story of Jasmine is very important for this, as it is a miniature image of this great transformation as well as of the contrast between the East and the West. The name of the novel is very significant as 'Jasmine' is the name that best symbolizes the moment in which the character is at the very crossroads of her identity. Jyoti, her actual name, is the symbol of her old, conventional and superstitious personality that is ingrained with the Indian old customs, while Jane is the name she acquires when she is already in exile in the United States. Jasmine on the other hand is the name that her first husband had given her as an endearment and as a way of breaking her old conceptions: "He wanted to break down the Jyoti I's been in Hasnapur and make me a new kind of city woman. To break off the past he gave me a new name: Jasmine. He said, 'you're small and sweet and heady my Jasmine. You'll quicken the whole world with your perfume.' Jyoti, Jasmine: I shuttled between identities."(Mukherjee, 77) it is in her short first marriage to Prakash that Jasmine thus first gets a glimpse of the contrast between the old, Indian way of life and the 'modern', Western one. It is also at this point that her sense of identity first wavers, since she is caught between her ingrained sense of duty and a new and freer way of thinking. An eloquent example for Jasmine's shaken sense of identity is her confession that, although not yet fifteen years old, she felt envious of other friends of hers who had remained pregnant at even earlier ages: "I didn't dare confess that I felt eclipsed by the Mazbi maid's daughter, who had been married off at eleven, just after me, and already had had a miscarriage."(Mukerjee, 80) Here, gender identity is obviously questioned as Jasmine wavers between the way she was trained to think of herself, as a passive object, someone who has to obey the male figure, and the new ideas she receives from her husband.
Her impulse after his death, of going to America to sacrifice herself in a college campus in Tampa where...
Grapes of Wrath The Epic in the Grapes of Wrath This paper discusses how the idea of the epic can be found in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. The novel itself is an enormous work of approximately 500 pages. And in the words of Howard Levant, it is "an attempted prose epic, a summation of national experience of genre" (Levant 91). Because Steinbeck is depicting more than just a "slice
Grapes of Wrath There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do," Jim Casy tells Tom in Chapter Four of The Grapes of Wrath. This quote from Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel illustrates the author's ability to celebrate humanity and embrace human faults with compassion. A former preacher who learns through experience that judging human beings according to strict moral doctrine is no way to cultivate compassion,
But the value and meaning of life and love described by Casy is manifested by the outsiders, the Okies, the rejects, the wanderers, the strangers, and the oppressed. They are the socially marginal characters of a self-satisfying culture. They are the ones Steinbeck admires in his novel for they are the ones who "wander through the wilderness of hardships, seeking their own Promised Land" (Shockley 87). They await the
Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck's novel, "The Grapes of Wrath," described the economic divide that existed in America during the Great Depression of the 1930's and the tragedies that occurred as a result. A native Californian, Steinbeck used his home state as the backdrop for a story of a family of migrant farm workers; derisively called "Okies" for their area of origin: Oklahoma. Devastated by a natural disaster commonly referred to
Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck's novel, "The Grapes of Wrath," described the economic divide that existed in America during the Great Depression of the 1930's and the tragic result that occurred as a result. A native Californian, Steinbeck used his home state as the backdrop for a story of a family of migrant farm workers, derisively called "Okies" for their area of origin, Oklahoma. The troubles the family faced, although originally
Grapes of Wrath Social Welfare The Great Depression affected everyone throughout the United States, but there is no denying the fact that those in the general Midwest were almost destroyed as a result. The complete social and economic consequences to a few years of drought, financial distress, and the growing applications of technology -- which led towards a social change in job placements -- all affected the farmer's plight. Based on John
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