Sadly enough, there are many issues of bitter betrayal and desperation in the novel Grapes of Wrath, and one such heated dispute is raised between separate members of the town in chapter five. Through the novel the author exposes the many complex problems lying in Oklahoma during the first years that it was settled. Times were difficult, the land was unforgiving, men had to find some kind of way to provide for their families, and at times this required him to turn his back on his fellow townspeople just for survival. Chapter five is an example of one such instance of betrayal in order to survive.
In those days the land was unkind to those persisten farmers attempting to farm it, and this posed a lot of problems for the men. Most of them had a wife and children to provide for, and when the land did not yield the crops that the men needed for survival, they were sortfo stuck in a very tough position. Most of them ahd to go to the banks and draw out a loan. A lot of the time this meant that the ownership of the land was transferred over to the bank as collateral so that the farmers would be held accountable to make their payments. When the payments were consistently not met on time because of some accident of the weather that destroyed their c rops, the bank would in a sense foreclose on the farm and take it over for their own purposes.
When the banks took over, they had to have someone to plow and plant the land for them so that it could be sown and they could bring in profits. Unfortunately, the people they chose to hire were often men from the town who had nowher eelse to turn and were grateful for a steady paycheck coming from wherever they could get it. So, in a sense the bank hired boys who had been in the town for years to go destroy the lives of fellow town members of whom the boys might have even been close friends. This caused many problems as those friends felt betrayed for a steady paycheck.
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