Independent Reading Grapes of Wrath 1

The Grapes of Wrath, written by John Steinbeck, is about a struggling families journey to California in seek of jobs during the Great Depression.  The family faces many troubles on their journey as they must leave their home behind, losing many loved ones on the way, and having to sleep on the side of the road with very little or no food.  Once they arrive in California they discover that there are no available jobs and must live in several different camps to survive.  In the end of the book, the family remains jobless and lives in a boxcar on a farm.  A reappearing symbol in the book is Rose of Sharon.  Although, I am not very familiar with religion, from what I understand, Rose of Sharon is another name for Jesus. The book is centralized around finding new beginnings.  Jesus is the mark of a new era, and the book is about a family seeking a new beginning.  She is married to a man name Connie.  Rose of Sharon is always speaking of how great their life will be together once the baby is born and they get to California.  She has it all planned out and believes everything will be okay.  “We got it all planned up what we gonna do…Ma, we want to live in a town. Connie gonna get a job in a store or maybe a factory. An’ he’s gonna study at home.”  Ironically, none of this occurs.  Connie runs away and suddenly Rose of Sharon realizes the responsibility of having a child and brings a lot of stress to her.  She is constantly worried about the health of her baby.  Surprisingly enough, she has a miscarriage.  When everything goes wrong, this was least expected to me because so much has gone wrong it seems like the baby is the one thing to bring light in the book and that her name resembles Jesus, which brings life to earth.  The book takes an odd turn as the family finds a starving man in a barn.  Rose of Sharon uses her breast milk to nurse the man back to health.  “Her hand moved behind his head and supported it.  Her fingers moved gently in his hair.  She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.”  This is one of the only positive moments in the entire story and happens in the last sentence.  The family is still living in a box car, with no jobs guaranteed for at least the next 3 months since cotton picking season is over, and many people in their family either dead or gone, but yet the book ends with a smile.