Question

Read the following excerpt from chapter 21 of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of

Wrath.
Those families which had lived on a little piece of land, who had
lived and died on forty acres, had eaten or starved on the
produce of forty acres, had now the whole West to rove in. And
they scampered about, looking for work; and the highways were
streams of people, and the ditch banks were lines of people.
Behind them more were coming. The great highways streamed
with moving people. There in the Middle and Southwest had lived
a simple agrarian folk who had not changed with industry, who
had not farmed with machines or known the power and danger
of machines in private hands. They had not grown up in the
paradoxes of industry. Their senses were still sharp to the
ridiculousness of the industrial life.
And then suddenly the machines pushed them out and they
swarmed on the highways. The movement changed them; the
highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the
hunger itself, changed them. The children without dinner
changed them, the endless moving changed them. They were
migrants. And the hostility changed them, welded them, united
them-hostility that made the little towns group and arm as
though to repel an invader, squads with pick handles, clerks and
storekeepers with shotguns, guarding the world against their own
people.
Analyze how the author uses the rhetorical devices of parallelism and diction to
convey the tone of the text. Be sure to include specific details from the text to
support your answer.

Answer 1

The author made used of certain rhetorical devices such as parallelism to highlight how helpless the situation of the migrants were and how they were hated and despised but had no choice but to try their best to survive.

Step-by-step explanation:

Parallelism in literary writing is simply the matching or pairings of words, or phrases within a sentence.

Diction has to do with the choice of words used when writing.

The subject matter here is about the agrarian and how they found themselves out of work because of the industrial boom.

They moved in search of food and to give their families a meal to survive.

Parallelism was used to emphasize their misery, sadness and frustrations.

For example, "a simple agrarian folk who had not changed …….. who had not farmed. They had not grown up…." was used to show the simplicity of the agrarian and how they were almost destroyed.

This repetition of phrases and clauses is parallelism.

The choice of words here by the author here to accentuate their sufferings were also visible with words like 'ridiculousness' used to highlight their situation.

"Their senses were still sharp to the

ridiculousness of the industrial life"