Read and analyze John Steinbeck's an excerpt from "The Grapes of Wrath" In this reading of the passage, focus on Steinbeck's structural organization. Keep in mind the many ways that you can use to divide the piece. Is there a shift in tone, time, or importance of incidents in the excerpt? It is ultimately up to you.
Excerpt:
(From Penguin Books, 1992)
The little farmers watched debt creep up on them like the tide. They sprayed the trees and sold no crop, they pruned and grafted and could not pick the crop. And the men of knowledge have worked, have considered, and the fruit is rotting on the ground, and the decaying mash in the wine vats is poisoning the air. And taste the wine-no grape flavor at all, just sulphur and tannic acid and alcohol.
This little orchard will be part of a great holding next year, for the debt will have choked the owner.
This vineyard will belong to the bank. Only the great owners will survive, for they won the canneries too. And four pears peeled and cut in half, cooked and canned, cost fifteen cents. And the canned pears do not spoil. They will last for years.
The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot build a system whereby their fruits can be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.
The works of the roots and the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing in all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. People come for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit-and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.
And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our successes. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill certificates-died of malnutrition-because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
After you have made the divisions, study the piece to see if you can explain why Steinbeck chose to organize it in that manner. (A helpful way of doing this is to ask yourself, what difference would it have made if he began with the information from the end of the passage?)
Next, complete the following sentence and use it as your topic sentence #1.
The author's structural organization in this passage begins with __________ and follows with ________________ ending finally with _______________________.