"It's the Monster. Men made it, but they can't control it." (pg. 33)
One of the key themes in chapter five of “The Grapes of Wrath”, includes that which is referred to as ‘the Monster’. In this chapter, the term ‘Monster’ is used as a label for the bank. The bank forcefully exerts its control over the struggling farmers and their families, as they force the struggling people to pay back the debts that they owe. The bank is referred to as a Monster because, as the ‘thing’ that holds power, it is easy for it to make the people do its bidding, or else it threatens to confiscate homes and other pieces of property. Because of the ‘Monster’ breathing down the farmers necks, they are reduced to beginning, stealing and taking whatever scraps they can find to allow them and their families to get by. There are many families who were forced to let go of their precious land due to the ever looming shadow of the ‘Monster’, either because their land had been confiscated from them, or because they had no chance of survival and moving west seemed to hold more of a promising future to them. This ‘Monster’ successfully took away all control from the farmers and their families, and trapped them into an abstract form of slavery (meaning that while the farmers were not literally ‘slaves’, the bank owned them and everything that they owned, leaving the farmers with few ways out).
In a detailed continuation of the ‘Monster’ metaphor, Steinbeck goes on to describe the ‘Monster’s monster’-- The cats (or tractors). Steinbeck discusses how, like the banks, the tractors had no regard for the land or for those who inhabited it. For three simple dollars a day, men were hired to destroy their neighbors lands by plowing over them. Another similarity these tractors and the bank was the fact that these tractors exerted control. The poor farmers whose lands were being bulldozed had absolutely no power to stop the tractors, thus the farmers lost all control, and with that, all hope. Through all of this, the farmers (even though they had much anger and much hatred towards the ‘Monster’ and it’s tractors) were utterly powerless to stop this greedy, wealth seeking machine that was the bank.
