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Marina Armstrong
O Connor
Honors English 9
10 February 2016
The Powerful and the Weak
John Steinbecks famous novels, The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, tell the
stories of a family who are faced with destitution and two men who arent accepted. These two
novels give an insight to what ones life might have been like during the dust bowl and what it
would be like to be weak and controlled by the powerful. In The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice
and Men, Steinbeck illuminates the hardships that the impoverished and unfortunate endured
through the use of plot, characterization, and theme. Through these two works of literature, he is
able to place the reader in the shoes of Lenny and George, the two unaccepted outsiders, and of
the Joad family, a poverty stricken migrant family. He allows his readers to see and understand
their plights and the horror that mankind is capable of inflicting on others and the cruelty that
those in power have over the weak.
In both Of Mice and Men and in The Grapes of Wrath, the plot of the story is what
intrigues the reader and what makes them see from another angle. Unlike Harvest Gypsies,
which is a series of articles also written by John Steinbeck, these two novels are stories. One is a
story of a migrant family who are forced out of their homeland in Oklahoma because of the dust
bowl and into California, the promised land. The other, Of Mice and Men, is a story of two men,
one mentally disabled, who is seen as an outsider and eccentric. What Steinbeck intentionally
does in both of these stories plot is he makes a real life situation into a story that his readers can
relate to. What relates in both these storys plot structure is how they are stories of the

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unfortunate, those who are not given equal chances; they are stories of travelers who in the eyes
of society belong nowhere because they are outsiders and therefore untrustworthy.
Without characters there is no plot. There is no reason for a reader to feel anything, to
understand or think about the situation. This is because humans connect to one another, they see
and feel things based on what other humans beings think and feel; we all rely on one another to
see clearly in what we believe in. This is just what Steinbeck was trying to do in his novels, he
was trying to connect his readers to the characters; to allow the reader to connect to the character,
to put himself in their shoes, to empathize with what it is like to be an outcast, to be the
unfortunate. There is Tom Joad from The Grapes of Wrath who describes in detail his and his
familys life. He is an investigator, he knows what is moral and what is not. His character allows
the reader to feel for him; an example would be when after Casy, a good, kind preacher, was
killed by a deputy and Tom leaped silently. He wrenched the club free. The first time he knew
he had missed and struck at a shoulder, but the second time his crushing blow found the
head..And then he was running along the stream, bending low(Steinbeck 496). This is one of
the examples of Tom's character; he fights for what he believes in, and doesnt run from fear,
these characteristics make the reader understand his situation and enable them to see the
wrongness that the deputys and others in power treated others who were weaker and had less
than them. In this, there is also a sort of irony, the deputy who should be seen as good, who is
supposed to protect the citizens, is doing just the opposite; he is the one inflicting pain and
making dissension among the migrants. Another character, Lennie, who is present in Of Mice
and Men, connects the reader to his story. Steinbeck uses Lennie as a character, a man who is in
ways mentally disabled, to show his readers the unfair treatment of those who dont fit social
norms. Lennie is seen as a bad man because he kills without notice but really he is good, and he
never really wants to hurt anyone; like a child, he wants to do right, to be good so he will get a

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farm with rabbits, but against his good nature, causes harm. The reader is able to see this during
the scene where Curleys rage exploded and he says, Come on ya big bastard...No son-of-abitch is gonna laugh at me. Ill show you whos yella(62) to Lennie and Lennie protects himself
by crushing Curleys hand. Lennie only does this because George told him to, the man who takes
care of Lennie, and after Lennie says I didnt wanta.I didnt want to hurt him (64).
Steinbeck includes these characters in order to reveal the brutal truth of the way that the good
were treated. He brings up the idea of power and how it is misused. He uses Lennie as a
character to show to his readers that although he is good and would never intentionally want to
cause harm, he is mistreated by those who feel inferior as Curley did.
Lastly, what joins these two books and many of Steinbeck other novels is a related theme
of the immoral use of power over the weak, and the unaware, horrifying, realities of the lives of
the impoverished and in all, the unfortunate. Steinbeck mentions this theme of how,

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. And children dying of pellagra must die
because a profit cannot be taken from an orange.And coroners must fill in the certificates-died of malnutrition--because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
..and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes
of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the
vintage(449).

This passage directly states the theme, it expresses the cruelty of mankind, of the destruction that
power and money can cause. The line, in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the
souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the
vintage refers to how the wrath, or the rage of the thousands of migrants, is growing and how it

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is going to continue to grow over time(vintage). This line could also be seen as metaphoric, how
with the continuous struggles that the migrants face, their souls become heavy. The grapes,
which usually imply health and nourishment, in this case have a negative effect and imply the
wealthy landowners and banks who are invoking wrath amongst the workers by making profit
off the grapes and only for a profit; they will not even give the starving the food, they would
rather waste it than give it to the poor because to their heartless minds making a profit is the only
thing that matters; not morals.
In The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck intentionally does not make a
happy ending. He does not conclude the endings either, he leaves the reader hanging and
thinking. He does this for a specific reason, he does it because in his eyes, problems that are
announced in these two novels are not yet solved. In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck ends with
the Joad family taking cover in a barn, hungry, jobless, homeless, and with every speck of
dignity and decency taken from them. In Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck ends the novel with the
shooting of Lennie which was done at the hand by George. He does not tell his readers what
happens to the Joad family or George because the unjust ways in which they are treated has not
stopped and will not stop until people stand up and do something, to acknowledge these horrific
ways in which the unfortunate are treated. And this is what he was trying to do in these two
novels, he was sending a message: a message to America and maybe the world about the darkest
chapters of our history, to take action and realize the cruelty of the powerful over the weak, of
the power that man has over mice and of the wrath of the people that comes with misused power.

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Works Cited:
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. New York: Penguin, 1993. Print.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin,1939. Print.