The Plot Contradicts the Moralsthe Novel Sets to Establish

In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck argues for a communist-like revolution in America, advocating community and the collective good with the depiction of the Joad family’s struggle against capitalist America. However, the story does not argue the point it is trying to make clearly enough with its characters and plotline, and does not adhere to the moral rules it sets to establish.

One theme that continuously occurs throughout the novel is that collective value and rights is the most moral method of living. As the Joads make their journey to California, Steinbeck describes the new mindset they adopt, in which families that meet together in a given campground share a mutual understanding of collectivism and community. In describing the “rich” families that had the luxury of canned peaches and packaged bread, Steinbeck wrote, “…but they ate secretly, in their tents, for it would not have been good to eat such fine things openly” (270).

Though he does argue that rich families should only eat fine food in the open if they can share, he does not support that notion clearly enough with the examples provided, failing to address the point that those families may not have enough healthy food to share with everyone on the campground, and may need the sustenance of such food rather than larger quantities of unhealthy, inexpensive food. Additionally, he fails to address that the “rich” families chose to reside in the campgrounds that poorer families stayed on, possibly making the move to California their neighbors were attempting. Regardless, these families are shunned and ostracized from the campgrounds the poorer families crafted into communities. Essentially, the act of envying those that could afford finer food causes their community ideal to break down, leaving a divide between the rich and the poor which the novel argues against.

Another confusing point frequently visited throughout the novel is that of property. In chapter nineteen, Steinbeck argues that a man should be able to plant a crop in the ground and cultivate it, and therefore claim the land as his own. Additionally he argues that since Grandparents stole the land from Native Americans their families owned it. In other words, property is not a right which should be granted to one person because they are most able to buy, but because they are the most capable to take it. The same point is discussed earlier in the novel, when the bank sends a tractor to level the Joads’ land and home. However, it is in this nature that the plot itself contradicts the morals it sets to establish. By Steinbeck’s argument, the Joads owned the land because they cultivated it. But by his same set of rules, the bank had the right to take the land as its property since it was more capable to steal it, just as the Grandparents of the "Okies" took the land from the Natives.

In this way the novel establishes a moral set of rules and then contradicts it, leaving a sense of confusion to anyone that attempts to challenge the novel's central arguments.