Grapes of Wrath Chapter 30

Rain is a good thing if you live in Springfield and it is 110 degrees out. Rain is also a good thing in California when there are wild fires. But rain is not a good thing for the Joads when they are looking for jobs, but the rain means there is not any work that day. Also it is bad for the Joads because they parked their truck next to a stream. Rose of Sharon (who, by the way, went into premature labor because she picked cotton and caught a chill) then goes into labor in the boxcar with Ma and Mrs. Wainwright as midwives as opposed to with doctors in a hospital that she had planned with her AWOL husband, Connie. But unfortunately for Rose of Sharon, her baby is a stillborn (but I guess that is kind of good because that would have been an extra mouth to feed for the Joads who don't have any money or food). Uncle John got to bury the baby, but instead he floated the baby down the stream hoping that someone will see it and know of the ill fortune that is happening to the Okies because the banks are greedy and the farmers have to listen to them, which causes the workers to suffer.

The ending of this book was really weird. It almost seems as if a different author wrote the last couple of pages. The book was depressing and and full of events that always had a negative side. Now here comes the ending with Rose of Sharon breastfeeding a dying man back to health, which in a twisted kind of way is a happy ending (for the man in the barn at least). That does not fit with the rest of the book. It was kind of anticlimactic too. After all of the struggles the rest of the family went through, we never find out what happened to them. The rest of the Joads could have starved to death while the guy in the barn lived. What happened to Tom or to Noah? I will never know because Steinbeck thinks it is okay to end a book with a character (not a main character even, but a supporting character [although since her scene ended the book, I guess that made her a main character]) nursing a man back to life that the reader met a page ago.

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.