nrose believes the tragic character of Casey is believed to be the symbolic representation of Jesus Christ himself. (Jim Casy's initials are JC, and he retired to the wilderness to find spiritual truth and came forth to teach a new doctrine of love and good works...Casy sacrificed himself for others when he surrendered himself as the man who had struck a deputy Sinrod 3at Hooverville...Tom told his mother, "I'm talking like Casy," after saying that he would be present everywhere, though unseen...) However the character of Jim Casy goes beyond Christ. While pondering sin and virtue, Casy comes to the enlightening conclusion that people cannot be judged "good" or "bad". ("Maybe it's just the way folks is...There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing. And some things folks do is nice, and some ain't nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say.") Viewing the morality of individuals as dynamic, as opposed to static, provides tremendous freedom for characters such as Tom Jode. He is capable of many different actions throughout the story, including intimidation, guile, support, love, and even murder. Steinbeck wants to show that even a murderer still loves his mother. The mother after all, is holding his family together. (In all the families in crisis, the children look to the women for answers to their immediate survival: "What are we gonna do, Ma? Where are we going to go?") At one point in the story, Tom Jode considers leaving home rather than possibly Sinrod 4endangering his family, however his mother reminds him that without his family, he has nothing. (There is no question that in this model the ...
