Reading the Classics discussion

Post comments here for these chapters.

This section of the book is so heartbreaking that I find it difficult to read every time. I feel like Steinbeck's use of foreshadowing becomes more and more prominent and you begin to know that every mile the family treks toward their goal is perhaps only a mile closer to their ruination.

I feel the same way. I am wondering if they are ever going to reach what they have in mind as a goal or maybe they should have stayed in Oklahoma as Connie realizes. Slowly one by one the family is dwindling away. Would it have been better for them not to have gone on this journey?

I haven't finished reading this section yet, but I'm on chapter 19. This chapter is getting me angry. Several times this has been said by others about the migrants: "Look how they live. Think any of us folks'd live like that?" I can see what the author is trying to get across. The irony of what they are saying, that these people only live like that because they have no choice. They are barely survivivng. If these other people saying this were forced to live with the conditions forced upon the migrants, they wouldn't live any better.

I know. If you read in the beginning of chapter 19, it shows how the ancesters of the people who now live in California and own all the land and who are saying all these things used to be the same as the migrants. They were once the squatters who came and took the land from the people who owned it at that time. It is amazing how over time people forget.
"Then , with time, the squatters were no longer squatters, but owners; and their children grew up and had children on the land. And the hunger was gone from them, the feral hunger, the gnawing, tearing hunger for land, for water and earth and the good sky over it, for the green thrusting grass, for the swelling roots."
"And it came about that owners no longer worked on their farms. They farmed on paper; and they forgot the land, the smell, the feel of it, and remembered only that they owned it, remembered only what they gained and lost by it."

I just feel like there are so many warning bells, not just for the Joads, but for so many of us who don't learn from the past. You can see disaster coming, but learning how to avoid it is nearly impossible sometimes.