Banks as we know them are smiling employees behind polished counters, gray ATM machines and the way in which one holds a pen while scratching away at a check. While we're aware of the loss of contact, a looming feeling that there is something enormous behind the machines and gleaming teeth, our fear is not extreme enough to be truly pondered over, our occasional bouts of contemplation are dismissed. A bank is a bank, customer service is customer service and our money is our money. Though it's obvious that the banks dominate chunks of the economy and force people away from their homes, we do not try to point our fingers at 'the bank' in a measly attempt to conceal whichever misfortune it may provide. We are aware of the departments, of the unions, of the different layers of the corporation. Banks are not individual beings, they are not something to spit at nor something to slap. But, no... this is wrong. Wrong through the eyes of the poor, half-starved farmers in the 1930's. Wrong in the sense that they do not live in our industrialized world, that the need something definite to shoot and kick and scream at. For them, the bank is not made of up sections but, in The Grapes of Wrath, the banks become greedy, epic and animate. They turn into cold monsters who feed off of the misery of those bulldozed off of their land. Monsters that crave the dry soil of the Dust Bowl, that frown upon emotions and family, accepting only money and prosper.
Though it's a huge factor that controls the entire book, the perspective of 'the bank' has been completely removed from the story. This is effective, making the bank even crueler. By excluding the perspective of the creature that the farmers in the South created, the bank grew even stronger, less and less penetrable. The reader is forced to think of the banks as the family being forced to leave their land thinks of the banks; as a demonic, robotic, sadistic scapegoat.
By creating vivid images of a steel, red-eyed glaring beast, something solid is created. Something that cannot escape the pleas of the evicted. Something that, perhaps if sought out and beaten, will be made able to somehow atone for the misery it afflicted. By neglecting reason and the side of another character, the pain of the characters who are able to express themselves is exemplified. Along with the personification of industry, the hate of the farmers is able to take shape, too. In the dreams of the evicted, they are able to shoot and curse what took their happiness from them. It is no longer the fault of the cotton that sucked the nutrients from the soil, so it's no longer the fault of their fathers and grandfathers. It suddenly isn't the doing of stubborn, dry clouds that the rain won't fall from, nor is it the fault of the seed that so stubbornly remains dormant. By not allowing the bank to have its say, a sufficient scapegoat has been created. Lack of perspective, while denying the freedom of some, tends to grant the liberation of another. It allows for the focus to speak as they want to speak, to create what they feel must be created. If made insufficient, the opinions of others can also become inferior, things that only block the satisfaction of another. So, why not cast that voice away and empower he who as been shamed?
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