The United States is a nation of travelers, and US narratives of travel within its borders have always reinforced this typically American self-conception. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is one of the most influential twentieth-century US travel narratives because it tells a story of cultural deracination with which most Americans can identify. At the same time, the novel depicts travel as an activity that, instead of unifying the country, brings out deep-rooted divisions driving the country apart along lines of class and regional difference. All of this works against existing stories of westward migration that dominated US history before Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis." Indeed, Turner's thesis depicted travel as a means by which Americans displaced already existing aggressions that had exploded in internecine conflicts in other countries.
By examining The Grapes of Wrath within a wider context of US travel narrative, it is possible to identify a shift in the conception of the US as a physical space. Before the twentieth century, people regarded the US as an almost sacred space upon which they acted out the drama of Manifest Destiny as part of an epic narrative of western expansion. In the twentieth century, as is evident in The Grapes of Wrath, the US becomes a serialized, commodified space no longer infused with the intrinsic meaning that epic once gave it in its popular conception. Instead, space acquires meaning through the profit motive which replaces narrative value with commodity value in a system of exchange. This shift is particularly noticeable in the experiences of tenant farmers like the Joads as they are uprooted from a land to which they feel tied through an epic narrative of their own cultural origins. The land is theirs, they argue, because their ancestors wrested it from the Native Americans, because they were born on it, worked it, and died on it. From their point of view, this logic is irrefutable and absolute, but it is no match for the physical force of the bulldozers used by the land-owning banks to level their farmhouses and drive them off.
Having been violently displaced from the land to which they feel tied, the tenant farmers find themselves in a new territory in which connections to the land are only temporary and determined exclusively by the rules of commodity exchange. On Route 66, the farmers find themselves in a serialized landscape of identical gas stations and road-side hamburger stands. As perpetual travelers, they become the ideal labor force for California farm-owners who can easily take advantage of their transience and their utter expendability. In Bakhtin's terms, the farmers' origins in a land circumscribed by epic narrative have been displaced by a novelistic terrain that is always in the process of becoming and in which they have no history. Such is the material from which Steinbeck has crafted this novel, and such are the conditions predetermining Steinbeck's own narrative style as he novelizes the emergence of the Dust-Bowl tenant farmers into an industrialized, twentieth-century US landscape.
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