The Grapes of Wrath

In contrast to the tractor which is portrayed as akin to a “tank” (157), hurting and intimidating people, cars and trucks are cast in a more positive light in the novel. This can be seen in the way the Joads gather around their truck for a family meeting. As Steinbeck writes, “The house was dead, and the fields were dead; but this truck was the active thing, the living principle [...]—this was the new hearth, the living center of the family” (104). The truck, or the car for other migrants, is what gives them hope. It is the means and the symbol of an escape from an old world which is dead. It presents the possibility of a newfound freedom and the chance for a new start in a faraway state.

Yet even from the outset this hope is fragile. These vehicles are old, overburdened, and prone to collapse. As Steinbeck writes, the cars were “limping along 66 like wounded things, panting and struggling. Too hot, loose connections, loose bearings, rattling bodies” (127). Many simply break down along the way, never to recover. They end up in the scrap yard visited by Tom and Al, amidst “[a] great pile of junk… a mass of derelicts” (185). Meanwhile, even those vehicles that survive do so only to endure more anxiety and travelling. The cars and trucks that were supposed to bring people to a new home become a means by which they can be perpetually denied one. Allowing the owners to maintain an entirely itinerant workforce, the imagined means of the migrant’s freedom becomes an instrument of their bondage. This is symbolized by the destruction of their vehicles in the rain at the end of the novel. The hope and the illusion of freedom have been utterly shattered.