At 3:44 this morning I finished reading Grapes of Wrath, a novel by John Steinbeck, first published in 1939. I know the exact minute I finished reading it, because I looked over at the clock when I closed the book, and I thought, "I'm going to be so tired today."
I should have read that book when I was supposed to read it -- probably sometime between 1998 and 2001 when I studied English literature in college. I could have picked it up a long time ago, sometime, somewhere. It just never happened. Then a few months ago I saw a tattered paperback copy for free. "Oh, good," I thought, "I've been wanting to read that." I'm pretty cheap sometimes.
Grapes of Wrath stuck with me, and compelled me to binge-read. It's an apocalyptic story. And with each step the Joad family took on their journey, I had the ominous sense that something bad was about to happen. And when something good happened it was almost always bittersweet because I knew something worse was close at hand.
It seems The Walking Dead writing staff has been inspired by Grapes of Wrath from time to time. Main characters disappeared and were never seen again, or were seen again, but only at death. Peaceful little pockets of humans are found, but are they really peaceful? In The Walking Dead, zombies replace police and angry mobs, but the mood is the same. Steinbeck's descriptions of the Joad family were made more stark by the dark vignettes that make up about one-third or a quarter of the book.
While reading, my mind sometimes wandered to my country, and our perennial hatred of economic and political refugees, or migrants. Whether they come from another country or from some part of our own country -- as in The Grapes of Wrath -- we treat them with contempt. When they are desperate and do things desperate people do, we label them as inherently criminal. Eastern-Europeans, Western Europeans, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Greeks, Italians, Jews, and others have been objects of hatred at different times in our history. We made the Native Americans desperate, and labeled them. And God knows our sins regarding Africans. God knows, and so does everyone else.
In the margins of my old paperback copy, a student had taken notes for her class back in 2007. Her name and the year are written in the front cover.
The student seems to have been preparing a paper comparing the experiences of the Joad family to the New Testament story of Jesus's ministry and crucifixion. Her notes made comparisons that only seemed to work on a very basic level. I feel she had the idea for the paper before she read the book, then spent the whole time pushing and shoving her comparisons, trying to make them fit into the molds. "Tom = Peter," she wrote in one margin early on. Then every comment about Tom was an attempt to make Tom into Peter. "Casy = Jesus," she wrote, and tried to make that work.
Steinbeck isn't one who would have written a thinly veiled New Testament. He was a master. He created parallels to Jesus and Peter. But I also saw elements drawn from such a vast trove of sources, that as I sit here thinking about it, I am awed. And his greatest source was his own mind. And again, I am awed. What a beautiful work of art The Grapes of Wrath is, from the first word, to the last. I believe the book's final message, summarized in its last paragraph, is prophetic.
If I had my druthers, The Grapes of Wrath would be required reading in American high schools. If you live in an English-speaking country across the pond, I still highly recommend it. It can be read for its literary value alone, but I can't guarantee you won't find yourself shaking your head and wondering why America doesn't learn lessons from its own history.