Comparing The Joad And Jeannette Walls In The Grapes Of Wrath
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John Steinbeck takes us back to 1939 on a journey in his novel, The Grapes of Wrath, where he illustrates a realistic but fictional story about the Joad family who must overcome several hardships and challenges while searching for a better and healthier lifestyle. Like the Joads, Jeannette Walls exemplifies her life story in The Glass Castle where she shares how growing up in different places and the troubles her family faced had pushed her to eventually leave. Both the Joads and the Walls family demonstrated resilience and optimism to help assist them in their life journeys from hard times to a promising future.
In The Grapes of Wrath, the Joads were a struggling family during the depression who exemplify what the life of a typical Midwestern farmer was like with the arrival and upcoming of the Dust Bowl. They dreamt of life in California, the “promised land”, assuming it would be…show more content… The successful journalist, Jeannette Walls, relates the dreadful childhood she experienced being raised by alcoholic, manipulative, and selfish parents. Her parents were described as awfully dysfunctional but yet very lively people who force their children to learn how to take care of themselves by feeding, clothing, and protecting each other thus giving their children hope that there is a better world out there waiting for them. The Joads experience many hardships, deprivations, and deaths just as the Walls did and by the end of the novel, they are barely surviving. Nevertheless, the family remains optimistic. This positive feeling is derived from the growth of the Joad family as they begin to realize a larger group consciousness at the end of the novel. The development of the family’s optimistic views can be seen particularly in Ma Joad and her focus on keeping the family together to her recognition of the necessity of identifying with the