Of human suffering & compassion in ‘Grapes of Wrath’

I first got acquainted with Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath not in the best of terms: It was a required reading for a final exam. There is something about a book being "required reading" that takes the fun out of reading. This negative feeling began to shape my outlook of the book. I thought of the book as an annoyance, something of an inconvenience.

Yet when I read it, it surprised me in a way I never imagined. This book is about human misery. Misery like in the circumstances presented in the book and in real life has the effect of not only creating hunger of the body but also the human soul. It is this misery that would be felt by the Joad family and the others in the book who, in trying to survive, would give the readers a wonderful insight into the complexity of their problems. This is how the book drew me in – through the Joads’ story. No longer were the suffering people faceless entities and sterilized demographics.

There is something of the characters in each of us, the same way that we sometimes find a little of ourselves in each of the characters. This identification created for me an emotional bond with them. Steinbeck leads his readers to feel like they’re part of the Joad family and the book becomes a shared experience between the characters and the readers. This reminds me of tele-novelas and why people become so hooked on them. Even though it is fiction, there is a strong feeling of empathy, the way that shared feelings of adversity strengthen emotional ties between people in real life.

That was how the book affected me. Since Steinbeck painted so skillfully the emotional pictures of the characters, they felt real to me.

The story of the Joad family echoes that of many marginalized and disenfranchised members of the human society. Too often, they are treated with fear and disgust. People see them as thieves who would steal anything not nailed to the floor, or as sexual perverts without fear of God, or too lazy to hold a job. And so they send them away.

Perhaps this is why Grapes of Wrath was so controversial when it first came out. Any story of profound human misery and social injustice is bound to be uncomfortable. Like Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables or Dr. Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo – books about human suffering and injustice – Grapes of Wrath also drew heavy criticisms.

When I first began to read the book I already had negative feelings and biases against it. I thought of the book as an unnecessary inconvenience even before I had an understanding of its contents. Perhaps that is why people were uncomfortable in discussing these issues. Most people are content to just live their lives without interruption and see a discussion of society’s problems as an inconvenience they don’t want to be bothered with.

Making the sufferings of one family a shared experience with its readers is probably the book’s great value. Reading Grapes of Wrath leads people to view society’s problems in a different way: It provides a deep insight into suffering and what makes us human. Feelings and emotions are the root of compassion. If society would like to care about these matters then society needs to feel something about these matters.

This book has done more than illustrate injustice or everyday poverty. It has made generations of readers empathize with its characters. It is the feeling of sympathy and compassion that one feels upon reading it that’s unique to the book – very few books have that kind of power. It is this concept of compassion that made Steinbeck write Grapes of Wrath and it is also this that will help bring about a change in society.

In my opinion John Steinbeck ended the book perfectly. Leaving the story hanging would, in a way, serve as a challenge to the readers. The author wanted to tell us that the ending, both of the novel and the human race, now depends on us.