Interchapter Style: Description and Discourse

While all the interchapters of Grapes of Wrath share the generalized and musing tone which lifts them out of the Joad narrative, most can be further categorized as "description" or "discourse" chapters.

About half of the interchapters (specifically 1,3,11,14,21,25,29) are description chapters. They employ general terms such as "the land, the migrants, the women." Some are just portraits of some piece of the landscape--a vacant house, a migrant turtle. Others give an outline of actions people take, but without specifics.

The other interchapters (5,7,9,12,15,23,27) are what I term "discourse" chapters because they are dominated by speech related to us in the form of indirect discourse. The narrator temporarily shifts without warning into the voice of some person. Quotation marks are almost never used, and for good reason. Even though these chapters give a sense of the presence of personalities, only a few are actually about specific characters. We get names occasionally, for example in chapter 15 with Mae and Al's diner, and in chapter 7 the boss car salesman refers to a co-worker named Joe. But overall, these interchapters could still be about any migrant, any car salesman, any diner. The reader is still supposed to generalize from these vignettes, even if the language is not explicitly so general as "the men squatted on their hams."

Chapters 17 and 19 are hybrids. They begin with a description and shift to discourse halfway through. The shift is a good place to see the contrast between the two modes. In Chapter 17 it occurs with a long dash on page 196 of the Penguin edition. Everything before the dash talks about "the families" and "the migrant people." After the dash, however, most of the rest of the chapter is discourse (in dialect) without attribution to a speaker. At the very end, description comes back with the sentence: "The families ate quickly, and the dishes were dipped and wiped." In Chapter 19, the shift occurs on page 234. The narrator has already changed from talking about collective nouns such as "Okies" and "Californians" to a specific "homeless, hungry man." But the shift in style comes in the following paragraph: "He drove his old car into a town. He scoured the farms for work. Where can we sleep tonight?"

Throughout the novel, interchapters alternate with Joad chapters with two exceptions: chapters 11 and 12 as well as chapters 14 and 15 are pairs of back-to-back interchapters. The reason Steinbeck can pull off the pairs and not seem to disturb the oscillatory rhythm of his narrative is precisely that he has paired a description and a discourse chapter together. Chapter 11 is a short description of the dialpidated house. Chapter 12 gives a vignette of a migrant family trying to buy a used tire. While chapter 12 contains some description (including the famous passage about Route 66), it is dominated by speech. Likewise, chapter 14 is the description of how the collective "we" is a result, not a cause. Chapter 15, however, is the most narrative of all the interchapters--the scene in Mae and Al's diner. It contains much dialogue, and even quotation marks (though they only begin several pages into the chapter).

The two types of interchapters give another, lower frequency, oscillation to the narrative structure of The Grapes of Wrath which is superimposed on the first sinusoidal pattern we identified in class as well as the linear trend of the Joad quest journey.