The final hundred pages of this novel is simply an exercise in hoping the plight of the Joads will improve. It will not nor is there a Hollywood ending. The novel ends with the family fractured and struggling to survive. Steinbeck also refuses to provide closure to the story of the Joad family.
What more can be said, there is a reason it won the Pulitzer and widely considered a classic. Steinbeck is unflinching in his account of the Great Depression. The Joads prove that while you think you have it bad, it could always be a lot worse.
The Grapes of Wrath is six hundred and nineteen pages of sorrow. It is immerses the reader in the bleakest period the world has faced economically. However, it is not a book that is stuck in the period that it is describing. It transcends time and it is applicable to the current illegal immigrant situation in the Southwest. Quite possible it is an essential read for all people with air in their lungs. It is a work that creates compassion for their fellow man...
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