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Chapter 20
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Grapes of Wrath, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Humanity, Inhumanity, and Dehumanization
Dignity, Honor, and Wrath
Faith and Guilt
Powerlessness, Perseverance, and Resistance
Family, Friendship, and Community
Summary
Analysis
The masses of displaced farmers are no longer farmers: they are migrants. These migrants have been changed by the industrialization that pushed them from their territory, and are united by the hostility they experience in the places to which they migrate.
A new identity for Okies has been forged from the hardships they have endured together.
Themes
Industrialists gain monopolies on the cultivation and canning of fruit, which drives smaller farmers out of business, and creates more migrants, desperate for work.
The cycle of greed and extortion produces more desperate people, suggesting that the cruel rich create the conditions that will lead to their own eventual downfall.
Themes
The banks work against themselves. The money they spend trying to suppress rebellion in the laborers could have instead been directed towards enhancing the laborers’ quality of life.
Enterprise becomes preoccupied with preserving its selfish ways, and overlooks the value—to itself included—of basic altruism.
Themes
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