Grasshopper

The grasshopper is a small but recurring creature in The Grapes of Wrath, its appearances concentrated in the early chapters of the novel, where it serves as a marker of the natural world's fragility and the casual violence that pervades the migrant experience. Though never a central symbol, the grasshopper's brief moments on the page contribute to the novel's dense texture of observed life, linking the human drama to the broader ecosystem that is being destroyed by drought and industrial farming.

Appearances and Context

The grasshopper first appears in Chapter 2, inside the cab of the red transport truck that gives Tom Joad a ride. A grasshopper "flipped through the window and lighted on top of the instrument panel, where it sat and began to scrape its wings with its angled jumping legs." Tom, in a moment of casual brutality, "reached forward and crushed its hard skull-like head with his fingers, and he let it into the wind stream out the window." This act, performed while Tom is revealing his prison record to the truck driver, establishes a connection between the insect's fragile life and the human violence that Tom has both experienced and inflicted. The grasshopper's brief, purposeless existence—scraping its wings, then crushed and discarded—mirrors the disposability of the migrant workers themselves in the eyes of the powerful.

In Chapter 3, the intercalary chapter devoted to the land turtle, the grasshopper is part of the miniature ecosystem through which the turtle crawls. The text describes "grasshoppers to jump into the air and flick their yellow wings for a second" among the ants, ant lions, and sow bugs that inhabit the grass at the roadside. Here the grasshopper is one of many small creatures, each with its own "appliance of dispersal," living and dying in the sun. The turtle's slow, determined progress contrasts with the grasshopper's quick, flickering movement, but both are subject to the same indifferent forces of the road—the turtle is nearly hit by a car, the grasshopper is eaten or crushed.

The Grasshopper and the Dust Bowl

The grasshopper's absence from the Dust Bowl landscape is as telling as its presence. In the opening chapter, the ecological disaster is described in terms of what is missing: the corn is ruined, the weeds are frayed, the air is filled with dust. The grasshopper, a creature that thrives in healthy grasslands, is not mentioned among the surviving animals. Its disappearance from the fields is part of the larger collapse of the natural order that drives the Joads and thousands like them off the land. The grasshopper's role in the novel is thus twofold: it appears as a living creature in moments of relative normalcy, and its absence marks the extent of the devastation.

Thematic Significance

The grasshopper's brief appearances reinforce the novel's themes of violence, disposability, and the interconnectedness of all living things. Tom's casual killing of the grasshopper in the truck cab prefigures the violence he will later commit against the vigilante who kills Jim Casy, but it also shows how easily life is extinguished in this world. The grasshopper, like the turtle, the gopher snake, and the jackrabbit, is part of the natural world that the migrants are leaving behind—a world that is being systematically destroyed by drought, dust, and the tractor. Its presence in the novel is a reminder that the human tragedy of the Dust Bowl is also an ecological tragedy, one in which even the smallest creatures are caught up and destroyed.