Narrative Method in Grapes of Wrath In Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck makes bold use of interspersed passages. As he noted in the diaries that accompanied the writing of the novel, the two narratives, although parallel, treat their subjects from quite different points of view and must be distinguished. After finishing the interchapter about tractors driving farmers off the land, Steinbeck observed: "Yesterday the general and now we return to the particular. I find that I am not very satisfied with the numbering of these chapters. It may be that simply being numbered with large numbers for the general and small for the particular, because I want the reader to be able to keep them separate in his mind." Apparently Steinbeck, or his publisher, decided not to use differently sized numbers in the final version of the novel. But the author's comments on this typographical demarcation indicate his intention: the general illuminates the particular, but merges with it. Critics have commented extensively on Steinbeck's thematic counterpoint in The Grapes of Wrath. Most studies of Steinbeck assume that the two narrative modes provide mutual rhetorical reinforcement. But the politics articulated in the interchapters and the fictional narrative do not mesh perfectly with each other. The prophetic voice that highlights the broader context and meaning of the Joads' experience formulates insights into politics and history that are considerably more revolutionary than those achieved by even the most left-wing fictional characters. Casy's insight that "all men have one great soul of which they are all a part"... and Tom's promise that "wherever there is a fight for hungry people to eat, I will be there"... remain with inside the discourse of a militant humanism. But the voice that incites the cultivators – “you who hate change and fear revolution” – and warns them of their impending downfall has undertaken a deeper analysis of the economic crisis: “If you who have the things that people must have , could you understand this, could you preserve yourself. If you could separate the causes from the results; if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, are results, not causes, you might survive But you cannot know this For the quality of possessing the blocks forever in the "I" and cutting you off forever from the "we". " The threat here is thinly veiled: the cultivators will not "survive." The actions of Tom and Casy demonstrate the openness of the disenfranchised masses to revolutionary practice; the prophetic voice articulates revolutionary theory. Note that Steinbeck's narrative method offers him useful opportunities to expound political doctrine does not mean arguing that his chosen doctrine is particularly revolutionary Steinbeck was a popular frontist when he wrote The Grapes of Wrath: he railed against the "fascist utilities and banks" that ran California. and was loosely affiliated with the [Communist Party] through the League of American Writers (of which he remained a member after the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 suggests, however, the pairing of Paine and Jefferson with Marx and Lenin). democratic anti-fascism entailed an attenuation of the class war theme of the text, even in the interchapters in which the prophet fulminates with greater anger. But the interchapters do not always articulate a doctrine to the left of that embedded at the level of the "story". Towards the end of the novel, the depiction of the dramatically altered relationships between men and women in the Joad family is undermined by the patriarchal assertions of the intercapitular voice. The novel opens with a description of the devastation of the Dust Bowl in which women look at men and wonder if they will break. The final interchapter.