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Motif
Explanation and Analysis—Connection to the Land :
The notion of a personal connection to the land serves as a motif throughout the novel. Steinbeck presents the tractor drivers who have supplanted the tenant-farmers as working on the land only indirectly through machine tools. As a result, he suggests, those tractor drivers have little connection to the land itself, unlike the tenant-farmers, who work with it directly and who have survived upon the land for generations. In Chapter 5, Steinbeck describes a tractor driver as a robot-like figure operating a monstrous contraption:
The driver could not control it—straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent the tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him—goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest.
Here, Steinbeck emphasizes what he believes is the lack of control the tractor drivers have over the machines that they operate. Though the driver controls the machine and could make it change direction by a mere “twitch” of his hands, the driver is not truly in control of his hands, as he himself is controlled by the company that owns the tractor. The unnamed company, which he characterizes metaphorically as a “monster,” has possessed the driver, taking possession of his “brain and muscle.” This driver, encased by the machine and manipulated by the company, is not in full possession of his senses and therefore pays little attention to the land, which he feels no connection to.
Steinbeck revisits this idea later on in Chapter 11, describing the lack of “wonder” and understanding that characterizes, for him, the tractor driver’s relationship to the land:
Then the corrugated iron doors are closed and the tractor man drives home to town, perhaps twenty miles away, and he need not come back for weeks or months, for the tractor is dead. And this is easy and efficient. So easy that the wonder goes out of work, so efficient that the wonder goes out of land and the working of it, and with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation.
While the tenant-farmers manipulate the earth around them with their own hands and hand-held tools, the “tractor man” lives far away from the land that he works upon and is away from it for “weeks or months.” Though his work is “easy and efficient,” Steinbeck feels that “the wonder goes out of the land,” and with it, the “deep understanding and the relation” to the earth. Through this motif, Steinbeck suggests that mechanized farming has alienated people from the land they live on and has contributed to the ecological degradation of the region.
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