The Grapes of Wrath - My Honest Opinion

In this blog, I am going to be brutally honest about how I felt concerning The Grapes of Wrath. I am holding nothing back, and saying how I truly feel, even if I am completely wrong in literary terms. My opinions may seem to contradict myself, but I believe this blog should be dedicated to my sincere feelings. I thought the book was simply . . . okay. I feel somewhat bad because I know the author intended readers to take a lot more out of the book than I did, but to be honest, I just felt like it was a novel that had its ups and down, but fell nothing short of being just alright.

I think by now in my English career, I have trained my brain to write about how much I enjoy a book I am forced to read, regardless of how much I like or dislike the novel itself. I can seriously come up with so many reasons why a book is in my list “of favorite novels ever”. Although I could write about how captivating and heart touching The Grapes of Wrath was (which I did not feel it was that great anyway), I will not. One of the reasons I found the book to be just okay is because to be honest, I do not enjoy reading Southern dialect for five-hundred plus pages. Steinbeck may have intended the novel to have a more notable impact with the dialogue, but for me, it did nothing. It only made the long novel harder to read and more time consuming. With this said, I am sure other readers were able to take more out of the dialect than I did, which I am glad for that.

Now that I have stated something I dislike about the novel, I think I should give credit to Steinbeck for something I believe he did truly remarkable. The ending of the story honestly caught me by surprise. I did not feel that way throughout the novel, and that is another reason why I was not a fan of it. I felt I could guess what would happen next after each chapter. Seven times out of ten I would say I was right in predicting the future of the novel. Anyway, I loved the ending because it was seriously charismatic. Weird, yes, but also very compelling (sorry for the sentence fragment, I told you I was going to be truly fixated on my opinion). I think high regard should go to Steinbeck because he made such an awkward and weird ending also a gripping and strong one, which is very hard to do successfully.

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