Family and "togetherness" under stress of unemployment
The families that traveled together managed to make the most of their situation. The struggle made them tougher but also made their hearts grow for one another and the fact that they were stronger as one, rather than six to ten individuals trying to survive on their own. The narrator within The Grapes of Wrath examines this aspect of the "Joad Family" as they were brought down by similar coniditions "And then all of a sudden, the family began to function. Pa got up and a lighted another lantern. Noah from a box in the kitchen, brought out the bow-bladed butchering knife and whetted it on a worn little carborundum stone. And he laid the scraper on the chopping block, and the knife beside it. Pa brought two sturdy sticks, each three feet long, and pointed the ends with the ax, and he tied strong ropes, double half-hitched, to the middle of the sticks." This portayal of family and "togetherness" is precisely what came out of this "Dust Bowl" era of moving to California and looking for a new home. It is not always expected that something good come from something so terrible as family tragedy and displacement, though these experiences produced such.