Was anyone else particularly impressed with Steibeck's descriptions of alive and dead? How the farms are dead now that they are empty, about the man working the fields that are not his land, and how the grandpa was dead as soon as he left the land.
"There is a warmth of life in the barn, and the heat and the smell of life. But when the motor of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it like the living heat that leaves a corpse" (157).
"But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry... When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land" (158).
"He died the minute you took 'im off the place... He was breathin'... but he was dead. He was that place, an' he knowed it" (199).
Is it foreshadowing of more death to come or simply description in relation of the death of the grandpa?
Grapes...
1 comment:
Hindsight is 20-20.
I have to say that this is foreshadowing for more deaths that will follow the family as they get further away from their land.
They are Antaeus in this sense.
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