more on "Grapes"

Before I return the library's copy of The Grapes of Wrath, I wanted to blog something from the introduction that I find interesting. This is a bit long, but I think really gives insight to the structure of the novel.

The following is from the Penguin Classics edition, Introduction page xvi:

In early July 1938, Steinbeck told literary critic Harry T. Moore that he was improvising his own "new method" of fictional technique: one that combined a suitably elastic form and elevated style to express the far-reaching tragedy of the migrant drama. In The Grapes of Wrath he devised a contrapuntal structure with short lyrical chapters of exposition and background pertinent to the migrants as a group - chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 17, 23, 25, 27, 29 - alternating with the long narrative chapters of the Joad family's exodus to California - chapters 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 13, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 30. (Chapter 15 is a swing chapter that participates in both editorial and narrative modes.) Steinbeck structured his novel by juxtaposition. His "particular" chapters are the slow-paced and lengthy narrative episodes that embody traditional characterization and advance the dramatic plot, while his jazzy, rapid-fire "interchapters" work at a nother level of cognition by expressing an atemporal, universal, synoptic view of the migrant condition. In one way or another, Steinbeck's combinatory method has allegiances to the stereopticon, mentioned explicitly in chapter 10. The novel demonstrates how form itself is a kind of magic lantern, a shifting lens for magnifying and viewing multiple perspectives of reality.

...His "general" or intercalary chapters ("pace changers," Steinbeck called them) were expressly designed to "hit the reader below the belt. With the rhythms and symbols of poetry one can get into a reader - open him up and while he is open introduce things on a [sic] intellectual level which he would not or could not receive unless he were opened up, Steinbeck revealed to Columbia University undergraduate Herbert Sturz in 1953.