;Okie,” even more difficult. "The moving, questing people were migrants now. Those families which had lived on a little piece of land, who had lived and died on forty acres, had now the whole West to rove in. And they scampered about, looking for work; and the highways were streams of people, and the ditch banks were lines of people.” (Steinbeck 107) Searching for the feeling of importance and belonging in the ethics they were raised to believe in, the Joads were unable to derive importance from their present life importance.Some emotional evolution of the family is shown best by the character Ma. Ma experienced the greatest change from thinking only of keeping her immediate family together, accepting that a broken-family will not be able to accomplish anything, to believing in a social extended family. "In the evening a strange thing happened: twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all the loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream.” (Steinbeck 235) The Joad family through their journey experienced the benefit of people uniting to accomplish goals. Ma said it best when she said, "Use'ta be fambly was fust. It ain't so now. It's anybody. Worse off we get the more we got to do." (Steinbeck 305) Ma, expressing volunteerism, presents the transition from thinking of ones self to being concerned for humanity.One of the main realities of human existence is the constant, unceasing passage of time. The unstoppable eternal force of time exemplifies the affects of the Civil War on the aristocracy of the south. Though the novel is mostly about the internal conflicts within the family, the external events of the time period’s influence can be seen through the character Quentin. Quentin’s obsession with the past, which results in his obsession with the passage of time, is a central theme of not only the Quentin section but of the entire book...
