Three Categories of 'Intercalary' Chapters within John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
The novel The Grapes of Wrath has an unusual structure and a uniquely intricate narrative strategy. There are thirty chapters in all, but fifteen of them are not so much about the Joads themselves, as about the Joads' surrounding environment, and the similar problems faced by other migrants like the Joads. The intercalary chapters provide the book with a universality it would not have otherwise. The intercalary chapters themselves can be divided into three categories. The first category has to do with the migrants' getting ready to leave the Midwest, for California. The second category has to do with their process of traveling westward. The third category has to do with the aftermath of the journey once they arrive in California. The Grapes of Wrath, while not universally well-received, was nevertheless as socially powerful in its time as other socially-critical American novels, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. As Claudia Durst Johnson states: In 1939, as the nation continued to suffer from an economic depression Regarded as one of the most devastating events in its history, a young California writer named John Steinbeck saw into print a novel about a f
As Harold Bloom points out: "The Grapes of Wrath is a flawed bur permanent American book, and its continued popularity after well more than half a century seems to indicate that it is anything but a period piece" (5). Clearly, the novel has stood the test of time, but it is also an experimental and at times eccentric work. Most unusual and unique is Steinbeck's insertion, in the otherwise linear text, of the sixteen relatively short, generalized "intercalary chapters", as Steinbeck himself called them (Owens, 28), not about the Joads in particular, but about the entire phenomenon of displacement and westward movement of migrant farm workers in general. for himself as referring to God, fate, some cycle of nature, or whatever he Chapter 5 is the longest and most powerful of the first set of intercalary chapters, those about the preparations of the Joads and many like them to head westward. As Conder suggests, of this chapter: lonely and perplexed, because they had all come from a place of sadness and As John Conder also notes, "The interchapters [sic] of Steinbeck's novel create a network of interlocking determinisms through their emphasis on the operations of abstract, impersonal forces in the lives of the Oklahomans" (p. 99). Of the enemy dust, Steinbeck also tells us, in Chapter 1, "Men and women huddled in their houses, and they tied handkerchiefs over their noses when they went out, and wore goggles to protect their eyes" (The Grapes of Wrath, p. 8). deterministic force underlying the others in the novel. In one fleeting just like the Joads, and what Steinbeck is writing about is a tragedy on an
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Approximate Word count = 3073
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page double spaced)
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