Questions by larkin.abraham - Page 27
Read the following excerpt from chapter 21 of John Steinbeck's The Grapes ofWrath.Those families which had lived on a little piece of land, who hadlived and died on forty acres, had eaten or starved on theproduce of forty acres, had now the whole West to rove in. Andthey scampered about, looking for work; and the highways werestreams of people, and the ditch banks were lines of people.Behind them more were coming. The great highways streamedwith moving people. There in the Middle and Southwest had liveda simple agrarian folk who had not changed with industry, whohad not farmed with machines or known the power and dangerof machines in private hands. They had not grown up in theparadoxes of industry. Their senses were still sharp to theridiculousness of the industrial life.And then suddenly the machines pushed them out and theyswarmed on the highways. The movement changed them; thehighways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and thehunger itself, changed them. The children without dinnerchanged them, the endless moving changed them. They weremigrants. And the hostility changed them, welded them, unitedthem-hostility that made the little towns group and arm asthough to repel an invader, squads with pick handles, clerks andstorekeepers with shotguns, guarding the world against their ownpeople.Analyze how the author uses the rhetorical devices of parallelism and diction toconvey the tone of the text. Be sure to include specific details from the text tosupport your answer.