The Monster's Sick oral presentation

The Monster’s Sick (oral sequence presentation)

1) (Introduction)
The text I’m going to talk about is entitled The Monster’s Sick which is an excerpt from the novel The Grapes of Wrath, written by American novelist and Literature Nobel prize winner, John Steinbeck, published in 1939. The scene is set outside a detrimental family’s farm located in the state of Oklahoma (which is right in the mid–south part of the country). The main characters involved in the story are the squatty tenant members of the poor family who cultivated cotton lands, the land owners and the monster, a metaphor word to refer to the banks. The text is about the struggling situation a country farm people faced during the outburst of The Great Depression in the US, but more importantly about the acts of unconsciousness which these materialistic organizations recur to in order to keep up with their profits, regardless the consequences.

2) May I read the text? / Would you like me to read the text?

3) I might divide the text into three parts.
First of all / Firstly / The first part, from line one to line 16, which is about the bad news brought up by the land owners to the already decrepit family in which they were being announced that they were evicted from their land due to dramatic changes to come as stated in line 13 where it is written that The tenant system won’t work anymore which means that that type of business is not profitable neither for the land owners nor for the banks, because a tractor man could accomplish what 12 or 14 families could do.

Second of all / Secondly / The second part deals with the numerous reasons the family men gave the land owners for which they should stay and keep the land. Nevertheless, the land owners refused to accept those statements and explained to them that the land did not belong to the people who inhabited it but to the ones who appeared on the legal papers.
A member of the family expressed in line 24, “An’ we was born here”. Where the author showed that the family was also illiterate, which was another weakness they had and that made it hard for them to get out of that precarious situation.

Finally, regardless their pleas, the poor family was recommended to go west to California where there might be work collecting oranges.

4) Summary
The text clearly depicts the struggling and desperation a great number of poor people passed through as a consequence of the chain reaction for an economical crisis.
From 1929 to 1939, there was an acute economical crashed in the United States of America known as the Great Depression. At that time, families living on rented lands; in this specific case, the ones in the state of Oklahoma which is located in the mid-south of the country, tried to grow crops such as cotton to scrape a meager living. Not only they confronted the economical difficulties but they also faced the drought phenomenon which clearly ruined the land. As the land was not profitable, the land owners were forced by the banks to sell it so they, the banks, could keep receiving their usual amount of tax money for them to remain strong or at least alive. That’s the way monsters act in order to get satisfied, metaphorically speaking.
As a result, the landlords asked the poor and famish family to move out from the property as soon as possible.
Even though a series of well sustained reasons were given to the landlords explaining why it was very unfair to make them leave their land, as they called it, stating that nearly four generations grew up, protected, cultivated and fought for that property, those were not convincing enough to change the land owners’ decision. Besides, the monsters were not men and they could control many people to do whatever they wanted. If the family didn’t leave they could even go to prison. Therefore, migrating to California was the only one option.

5) The author’s intention‘s on this excerpt is to criticize the corporate system and compares it with a sick monster as it is stated in the title of the text which means the banks have to have profits all the time or they will die.
Paradoxically, people were hoping for the American dream to come true and the banks were taking away that dream by leaving many of them homeless and starving.

6) I agree with the author when he means that corporations do not care for anything else but themselves, in the story, the poor families are literarily kicked out of their lands when these don’t produce or when cutting expenses are needed, regardless the consequences as long as they are not affected. That situation is stilll happening everywhere nowadays.

7) To conclude, the American dream was washed away by the hungry corporations that didn’t care if families were left abandoned on the streets as long as they were making profits.

8) That brings to my attention something very familiar I saw on the news not long ago in Colombia where many people lost their properties to the banks because they couldn’t continue paying the high interests these corporations demanded, although the properties were already paid in full.

9) To wrap it up, I Hope this awful crisis that the world is experiencing again, won’t turn into an even bigger nightmare for the population of the planet.