For the tenant farmers of the novel, to be torn away from their land is a shattering experience, akin to death itself. See Muley Graves

• The effects of technology

The tenant farmers rely on growing methods of bygone days. Because machines can make land profitable, landowning banks send in tractors and dozers. Machine drivers lose touch with the soil; in effect, they become nonhuman pieces of equipment.

• Casting off the old ways

When the Joads change from farm people to road people, they have to cast off not onlly many of their belongings, but their habits and customs as well.

• The human family

People need each other every step of the way. Muley shares his rabbit with Tom and Casy. The Wilsons can’t go on without assistance from the Joads. The Wallaces invite Tom to work with them. Mrs. Wainwright aids Rose of Sharon in childbirth. Rose of Sharon offers her milk to a dying man.

• Government for the people and by the people

Only in Weedpatch do the migrant people find safety and comfort.

• Unions

When workers stick together in a righteous cause, they can accomplish anything. But you have to be prepared to make sacrifices. If you break with your brother, you’ll be hurting both him and yourself.

• Grapes of Wrath

Anger in many guises dominates the book. Why else call it The Grapes of Wrath? The tenant farmers are angry at the landowners. Roadside characters such as the one-eyed man are angry with themselves. Californians’ fear of the migrants turns to anger. And most of all, the migrants are angry. In a land of plenty, they are starving.

• Quest for the dollar

The pursuit of money is a perfectly legitimate activity in our society. But what happens when, in the quest for the dollar, human values are forgotten? Banks force people from their homes; big farmers eat up little farmers; landowners exploit workers; food is burned and buried; people starve. At what point does the pursuit of money turn into a crime?

• Endurance

Embodied by the Joads and Ma Joad in particular. The story celebrates the indomitable human spirit.

• "I" to "we"
• the brotherhood of man

• Despair, hopelessness, chaos

• Novel about the American Dream – both the original notion that a solid Christian work ethic can lead to success and the later idea that only an exurbanite accumulation of wealth is true success.
• Novel about an American hero, an outsider who fights to earn his dream as he wins our hearts

• Many people feel that Tom is the protagonist of this novel. There are many evidences of this: he is the first of the Joads mentioned; the action seems to follow his character; and his character received his name as an honor to Steinbeck’s close friend Tom Collins, to whom the book was dedicated.
• As central as he is to the novel, his character is still somewhat confusing. Some would argue that he is a classic American hero. Others feel he more accurately fits the role of epic hero. Still others feel he is a Christ-figure. What do you think? Can you give evidence to support your thoughts?
• Tom, an ex-convict, is sturdy enough not just to take care of himself but to support and defend others.
• Tom has a quick temper – speaks harshly to the truck driver who gives him a lift; scolds the one-eyed man for feeling self-pity; tells off the fat man who runs the filling station. Tom doesn’t despise each man, but only what each stands for. Each feels defeated by life’s hardships. He can’t just throw up his hands and walk away from problems. And he doesn’t want to see others do that either.
• Tom defies his parole by leaving Oklahoma and ultimately at the end of the book by devoting his life to help organize strikes.
• Tom accepts his prison punishment, but he can’t accept abusive behavior: he hates being forced to hide from the deputies on his very own land at the beginning of the novel; he avenges Casy’s death at the end.
• Tom is loyal, straightfoward, and realistic, in contrast to Casy, who is a visionary. His only concern through much of the novel is the task at hand.
• Tom admires others that struggle to live a decent life. To save Floyd from unjust arrest, Tome knocks down the deputy. To keep peace at the Saturday night dance, Tom stands watch. To find out why workers at the Hooper Ranch entrance were angry, he ignores the guards’ order to mind his own business. This marks the beginning of his active following of Casy’s philosophy.
• From this point forward, Tom’s concerns extend beyond his own family to the "family of Man."

• Casy is, in many ways, not, an important character in the novel. Steinbeck himself says that he decided to lose Casy "for a while" during the novel.
• Casy is made to bear most explicitly the conceptual values of the novel because Steinbeck’s method is to keep to the level of discours of his simplest folk.
• Casy is a spokesman for the movement from "I" to "we"
• Casy know that "we got a job to do" and applies the principles of his perceptions to help "the folks that don’ know which way to turn."
• Casy has given up the negative or legalistic aspects of Christianity to endorse its spirit; the metaphysics of Christianity he exchanges for those of Emersonian transcendentalism.
• Casy has forsaken the Holy Spirit (which he sees as being apart from man) for the human spirit.
• Casy says "the ‘Sperit ain’t in the people no more"; they seem forsaken, lost, and lonely
• Casy says "the Sperit ain’t in me no more," a statement that he qualifies immediately by saying that the spirit is still strong in him but has changed from an abstract divinity to concrete action.
• Casy says "I got the call to lead the people, an’ no place to lead ‘em."
• Casy gave up preaching; also Ralph Waldo Emerson gave up the ministry because of his unorthodoxy.
• Casy uses Emerson’s concept of the "oversoul." "Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of."
• Transcendentalism – Casy says, "There was the hills, an’ there was me, an’ we wasn’t separate no more. We was on thing. An’ that one thing was holy."
• Like Emerson, Casy came to the conviction that holiness, or goodness, results from this feeling of unity: "I got to thinkin’ how we was holy when we was one thing, an’ mankin’ was holy when it was one thing."
• Contrast – any man’s self-seeking destroys the unity or "holiness" of nature: "An it [this one thing] on’y got unholy when one mis’able little fella got the bit in his teeth, an’ run off his own way…Fella like that bust the holiness."
• As Christ figure – Jim Casy, initials are the same as Jesus Christ’s.
• Teacher of a social gospel
• He retired to the wilderness to find spiritual truth. Jesus emerged from 40 days in the wilderness to begin his public ministry.
• Last words – "you don’t know what you’re doing" echo Christ’s words on the cross
• Sacrificed himself for others both in the first Hooverville camp and at the peach farm
• Tom (Thomas) became Casy’s desciple. Thomas was one of Christ’s desciples.
• Casy and twelve Joads leave Oklahoma together. (Jesus, 12 desciples)
• Crowing of roosters the night Casy dies. Joads have to "deny" Tom to survive at this point.
• Casy taught as one with authority. His gospel coincided in certain respects with Jesus’ doctrine: love for all men, sympathy for the poor and oppressed, realization of the gospel in active ministry, subordination of formal observances to men’s real needs and property to humanity, and toleration of men’s weaknesses and sensual desires.
• Casy eulogy for Granpa: "An’ I wouldn’ pray for a ol’ fella that’s dead. He’s awright" echoes Christ’s message of "Let the dead bury their dead."
• Casy’s doctrine of sin led to his positive doctrine of love, "Maybe it ain’t a sin. Maybe it’s just the way folks is… There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say."

• Steinbeck’s book opens with drought and ends with flood, waters that return to the earth and replenish its life.
• Steinbeck wanted to end with a powerful symbol of human life persisting despite the hostility of social forms and of nature which resulted in a destructive storm, a still-born child, destitution and starvation. In humiliation, discord and chaos, life struggles and – however gross and incongruous its means – survives and is re-born out of the tempest, through human courage, choice, and love.
• Rose of Sharon’s gift is in some ways similar to the Catholic Eucharist (body and blood) that gives life.
• Rose of Sharon’s smile announces her initiation into a matriarchal mystery: the capacity to nurture life.
• In saving a stranger, Rose of Sharon rises from brute survival instinct into a nurturing state of grace.
• Rose of Sharon realizes that people need each other in order to survive. She contributes to "the greater good."
• Two persons become one, not through sex or even love, but through their selfless flow into a broader stream, the rising water of human endurance.
• Steinbeck wrote of this scene: "Rose of Sharon’s offering is a survival symbol": as a woman, she represents not the alleviation of oppression but the ability to endure it.
• Steinbeck also wrote, "I’ve tried to make the reader participate in the actuality, what he takes from it will be scaled entirely on his own depth or hollowness. There are five layers in this book, a reader will find as many as he can and he won’t find more than he has in himself."
• Rose of Sharon – misfit or Madonna?

• Hooverville camps / Weedpatch
• Oklahoma / California
• Expectations of California for the migrant (Joads) / reality
• Landowner / laborer