The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck (1939)
“The novel John Steinbeck embedded with migrant workers to write — then watched get burned by the people it exposed.”
Character Analysis
Introduced as a pragmatist who killed a man who stabbed him first and did his time without complaint. Tom is not a hero before the novel — he's a man who made a specific mistake and paid a specific price. What the novel does is radicalize him: through Casy's influence, through witnessing Casy's murder, through hiding in a culvert while his family starves, Tom Joad becomes a person who understands collective action not as ideology but as the only rational response to systematic oppression. His farewell speech is the novel's thesis stated by the person least likely to theorize.
Okie vernacular, clipped and direct. No Latinate vocabulary. Uses 'fella' and 'they's' and contracted forms throughout. Becomes more abstract and philosophical in the culvert speech — Casy's language has filtered into him.