“Hey, Sam, have you started your AP Lit summer work yet?”

I turned my attention away from tuning my cello and looked up at Alison, my orchestra camp stand partner and longtime friend. Sheepishly, I laughed.

“Well, not yet… but I’ll be fiiiine. It’s just one novel and ten journal entries, right? And June doesn’t end for another week! It’ll be a breeze…”

It was not, in fact, a literal or metaphorical breeze. “It” was The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, the worst reading experience I had in all of AP Literature!

Now, I fully acknowledge that much of the blame for my dislike of this novel falls on the result of my immense procrastination; however, one can’t ignore that I found the main story generally boring, tedious, and depressing (as you’d expect of a Great Depression-era work). No, it was not the plot, but one of Steinbeck’s literary devices that kept me hooked and kept the time crunch from driving me insane: the widely controversial inclusion of intercalary chapters, excerpts that vaguely align with the novel’s themes but have absolutely nothing to do with the actual plot. The most infamous of these is an entire chapter dedicated to describing a tortoise’s futile attempts to cross a highway.

When asked in class discussion a year ago what I thought of these chapters, I joked that I liked them–because they break up the monotony of the story! This was only partial lie, as while I did enjoy them (and they did give my brain a break), it was for another reason, a reason I couldn’t put into words…

It’s a reason that can, however, be put into pictures!

 

Every story or book starts on a clean slate,

and the plot can be visualized as a linear progression across the “slate”.

The plot gives a glimpse into the meaning, rhetorical situation, or big picture behind a work, but only that. A glimpse.

Intercalary chapters don’t connect to the plot. They’re scenarios isolated in their own bubbles, but they’re also windows into the worldbuilding that the plot doesn’t highlight directly.

When they’re included, the audience can begin to see…

the bigger picture!

 

Looking back, I no longer think negatively of The Grapes of Wrath at all. It and the lesson it taught served as a great course introduction: a book does not need to be entertaining to hold literary or rhetorical value, and a book does not need to have literary or rhetorical value to be entertaining. Steinbeck’s work falls into the first category, as it… doesn’t exactly make for good light reading but holds literary value within its depiction of the comfortless reality–reality, not story, as the keyhole-expanding, big picture-highlighting intercalary chapters try to demonstrate–experienced by millions of Americans during the Great Depression.