When Casy is in jail, he does not just sit there depressed and not do anything, he tries to learn and speak to people about problems that they are facing. He picks up on things by watching what is going on in his surroundings. When Casy was telling Tom the epiphany, the moral of the story was that if you start demanding things from the authority they will give it to you but you have to be as a team or a large group. If one person stands up and starts demanding things it would not work, because the larger the mass the more likely the authority will give in. It might be out of fear, or just simply because they know that they have the resources to do so and they were not before because they were being greedy. This had never occurred to Casy because he had never seen it first hand, Tom does not understand because he has never seen it. I think that Steinbeck put this part in the book because he thought that if all the people during the Dust Bowl and the Depression actually stood up together and did not just look out for themselves and tried working as one that they would have gotten out of the rut a lot faster, even though it might have been inconvenient at times. Because if they would have worked together the economy would have gotten better and money would have started circulating again. You see this point a lot in this book also with the I to We.
Meredith,
ReplyDeleteAnother insightful post. Steinbeck argues that there is a way to live the life you want to, but it isn't necessarily going to be easy.
This post scores a 4.