There is an epic scope to the opening chapter, as if Steinbeck is announcing to the reader the
grandness of his theme. Comment on how he suggests the grandness of his conception.
I am woman....hear me roar.....
9 years ago
Saturday, March 3, 2012
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3 comments:
I think he has to begin with a description of the land and the things about the land and the seasons that the boy loved. The land plays a big part in the story because the lives of so many people revolve around how their love of the land and their caretaking of the land affects them and their families. It is a background for the story.
If you are a Steinbeck dork like me then you know that he considered this “The Book”. He said that everything else he wrote was practice for this book and he had always talked about writing “The Book” about the Salinas Valley, his home. So from the get go it had to sound all encompassing and larger than life. I felt like he took us into his world and into humanity from the first page. It might as well have started with the words “in the beginning” (please do not take that as blasphemous) because it was his epic story of his world, the people in it and what it means to be human and how the world he experienced paralleled the very first stories ever played out in the world.
From the beginning we saw his whole world and were also immediately able to relate to the people. When he talked about how their river was nothing special but how they bragged about it because it was all they had…so simple but so totally common to the human race. And he talked of how in the wet years they never remembered the dry years and in the dry never remembered the good years…also so simple but SO human. So many little examples like that that pulled me in from the start and made me say…I relate to that, and that was all before we even met a SINGLE character. Brilliant!
I agree with you guys. He managed to suck us in with all that description and that in itself is kind of amazing because I can sometimes get bored when there is so much description right off the bat... if you know what I mean.
He really paints the setting for us and prepares us for what is to come.
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