“You figure the strike is a wound?”
The man who figures the strike is a wound is Doc Burton, Steinbeck’s personified metaphor of non-teleological thinking. This characterization hits a nerve with Mac, his personified metaphor of a committed idealist who can’t see problems exist on both sides because he has so firmly cast the other side as villain. This outburst and the musing leading to it occurs late enough for readers to has intuited their philosophical standoff, but early enough that it is not yet plain Doc’s vision will win in the end.
“We only want to settle this thing peacefully. American citizens demand order, and I assure you men we’re going to have order if we have to petition the governor for troops.”
Bolter is President of the Torgas Valley Fruit Growers’ Association and he is eager to get striking workers back into the fields. His framing the conflict within the irrelevant context of the strike needing to end for the purpose of maintaining law and order was and still is a common tactic on those siding with management against workers during strikes.
“People have said, ‘mobs are crazy, you can’t tell what they’ll do.’ Why don’t people look at mobs not as men, but as mobs? A mob nearly always seems to act reasonably, for a mob.”
A great mount of discourse takes place in the novel over the concept of a mob both in literal and figurative terms. The mob is to Steinbeck something to view with suspicion, but in this voice of his spokesman for non-teleological reasoning, he asks that people not react to a mob by responding to what it may be, but rather to what it clearly is: a collective entity acting as an organic being rather than the sum of many individual parts. A mob, in other words, cannot be explained, but how it works most certainly can be understood.
"It seemed a good thing to be doing. It seemed to have some meaning. Nothing I ever did before had any meaning. It was all just a mess. I don’t think I resented the fact that someone profited from the mess, but I did hate being m the rat-cage.”
This particular quote occurs quite early on in the novel. Jim is telling Mac that the mere act of typing up letters to help Mac organize the workers as part of his Communist party campaign gave him a sense of belonging. Up to that point, his life was truly a miserable existence. Steinbeck is quite clearly not playing this for irony or any kind of subversive technique and so it may seem at odds with the novel’s insistent and consistent negativity toward group-think. The difference is that it does occur early and it is reveals that the Party can create a sense of community rather than indoctrination into group-think and, what’s more, it has that potential. But being just as subject to the rules of competition as those working for the owners, this potential inevitably gets stampeded by the rules of strike warfare and the appeal to the individual gets subsumed by the needs of the mob.
He cried out, and jerked his hand away, and wiped it on his trousers, for there was no face.
Mac is the one crying out and he does so because at that moment he realizes the twin loud roars and flashes of light that signaled the act of a shotgun going off behind them not only hit Jim, but hit him squarely in the face. Which he no longer possesses as a result. The ending is an ironic counterpart to the above excerpt which occurs more than 300 pages earlier. That feeling of community which allowed Jim to feel a sense of identity for the first time in his life has ended up quite literally stripping him of the most important physical requirement for establishing one’s identity.
