by NikoRad

Created on: November 04, 2009

The death of a character can be a central factor in understanding events that precede, incorporate, or follow that particular death. Death can incorporate and bring about a multitude of vivid elements that create great literature. Foreshadowing, symbolism, the turning point or climax of a story, allusion-so many integral pieces of literature can permeate through the story and become more than words.

Instead, the reader feels and understands, sympathizes and reacts. Death is a reality everyone must come to terms with eventually; mortality makes it an inescapable truth that surrounds us every day.

Including such a universal concept in literature helps foster a personal connection of the reader to the story. Authors can use death to exemplify the meaning of their work, using the death of a character to tie the knot and connect pieces of the plot that would otherwise remain unresolved and irrelevant. Just as death is the process of bringing life to an end, so too can it function to bring the action and conflicts in a work of literature to a close and, in the process, shed light on what an author truly wishes to convey to their reader.

John Steinbeck's does just this in The Grapes of Wrath, incorporating the death of Grandma and Grandpa Joad to bring about an important allusion and meaning to one of his greatest works.

When the "Monster" (the bank) takes the land from Tom's family in Oklahoma, an important biblical allusion is put into motion that is upheld throughout the story. The journey of the Joads to California serves as a direct allusion to the Israelites' biblical exodus from Egypt, in which they searched for God's Promised Land. The oldest generation of Israelites was cursed to wander the desert until their deaths for committing the sin of idolatry against God, and only the younger generation would finally be blessed and come upon the Promised Land. The Joads do not enter California before Grandma and Grandpa pass away.

Death is not just simply an event in a story; it is a pivotal occurrence that lets the Joads enter California. If Grandma and Grandpa had lived on, then technically something would have held the Joads from getting into California, if the biblical allusion doggedly stayed as a symbolic map for the story.

An underlying accusation in the story is that the older generation is responsible for the problems of that time. When the problems had just begun, they should have smothered them, before they spread to affect the entire nation. The

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