Symbols of dispossession in John Steinbeck’s "The Grapes of Wrath"

In his masterpiece "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939), John Steinbeck outlined an archetypal paradigmatic account of the dangerous journey and hostile treatment migrants and immigrants faced during the Dust Bowl era, and still face today. Focusing on the story of the Joad family, the novel aims at providing a universal representation of the migrants’ odyssey in any place at any time. Even though they are migrants within their own country, they are perceived as an invading army of “[o]utlanders [and] foreigners” (GW 247), and they experience a dramatic process of dispossession (Shillinglaw, xiii), implying the loss of anything they had. Besides contextualizing the Joads’ experience, this paper focuses on the analysis of some images and symbols – the Mojave Desert and the Joads’ house, for example – Steinbeck used to translate in literary terms the drama of dispossession.