Sunday, April 24, 2011

John Steinbeck and the Recession of the Early 2000's.

In order to sufficiently and accurately analyze how John Steinbeck would react to a current event, I will compare two similar events, one of modern day and one of Steinbeck's time period. Steinbeck has long shown sympathy in his writing for the working class and its struggle against greed, as a result I have chosen the event of the recession of the early 2000's which has been a very prominent issue in recent years, with the Great Depression which Steinbeck lived through and discussed through his writing. Steinbeck most famously responded to the Great Depression through his novel The Grapes of Wrath, based upon this, one could likely predict that he would respond to the recent recession in a similar manner. In The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers who struggle to adapt to the changing economy, the drought, and other hardships to describe the struggles and challenges created by the Great Depression. Steinbeck would likely focus use a modern family with similar circumstance to the one in The Grapes of Wrath as a literary device to describe the recession. For example, it is likely Steinbeck would investigate the life of a blue collar worker who was already struggling and working excessive hours to just support his family. Perhaps the worker's skills would be becoming obsolete due to either the recent changes in technology or maybe even due to the large number of jobs in America being sent to other countries. Such circumstance would be tantamount to those in The Grapes of Wrath as the already struggling family were challenged even further by the transformation of the financial and agricultural industries. Steinbeck's book would likely be very sympathetic to the blue collar workers and very critical of the large corporations and greed which only fueled the hardships caused by the recession. Furthermore Steinbeck even released a famous quote while writing The Grapes of Wrath in which he stated "I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression and its effects]." It's not difficult to see Steinbeck making a practically identical statement in modern day towards the recent economical hardships and its effects which were fueled by American greed in the recession of the 2000's.

1 Comments:

Blogger chhanva said...

Much more to be said on this topic, a real rich subject

January 30, 2012 at 6:48 AM  

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