Novel Similarities in the Grapes of Wrath & War and Peace
At first glance the novels The Grapes of Wrath and War and Peace may seem to have very little in common, but on further inspection the two historical novels show a number of similarities and shared qualities.
Before you even read The Grapes of Wrath or War and Peace, you know that both are rather big books - "big" as in famous and big as in long - but the novels' similarities go deeper.
Historical Novels
In both intention and substance, The Grapes of Wrath and War and Peace are "historical novels." Each book takes up a particular period of history for examination and imagines the lives of the people who lived through it.
In The Grapes of Wrath, the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s is examined as it relates to the lives of farm workers from the American "dust bowl".
War and Peace looks at the Napoleonic Wars fought between France and Russia in the early 19th century, following the lives of soldiers and civilians during that period.
The most obvious similarity of War and Peace and The Grapes of Wrath is this shared interest in exploring the human side of a particular era of history and attempting to calculate the weight of these periods in the most human terms.
No Single Protagonist
The nature of the historical novel, as written by Tolstoy and Steinbeck, calls for a certain broadness of interest in character.
Though Tolstoy balanced multiple central figures in Anna Karenina as well, the choice of focusing on more than one character was not common in his work. In War and Peace, at least four characters can be considered as protagonists, receiving considerable attention throughout the novel.
This is the second clear similarity of War and Peace and The Grapes of Wrath because Steinbeck also chooses to focus on multiple characters in his historical novel. So it is true in The Grapes of Wrath also that no single character can be said to be the protagonist.
In The Grapes of Wrath, the protagonist role is shared by several members of the Joad family, with Ma and Tom being the two characters of the most central importance.
Authorial Context
Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace, is best known for his two epic novels - epic because they are so long. Tolstoy's books were not all as long as War and Peace or Anna Karenina. A number of his works were short enough to be called novellas (The Kreutzer Sonata and The Death of Ivan Ilyich). The form of these fictions varied with some tales taking the shape of moral stories, some war adventure stories, and some intellectual investigations into the truest ways to live and love.
Tolstoy also published non-fiction works on philosophical, spiritual, practical and political subjects.
John Steinbeck is an author with a similarly varied bibliography. Steinbeck wrote plays (The Moon Is Down), non-fiction (Travels with Charley), allegorical fiction (East of Eden), and both long and short novels.
Each of these authors created a large body of work and for each of them the historical novel was a unique event, happening only once.
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Published by Eric Martin
Eric Martin is an artist and writer. Look for more of his work in The Stone Hobo, the Antelope Valley Anthology, The Open Doors Poetry Zine, Failure of Theory, Euclid's Negatives and on stage. He is an owner... View profile
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