A Study Of The Subaltern And The Subaltern Narrative In John Steinbeck’s Workers Trilogy

As a famous American writer, John Steinbeck published his famous "Workers Trilogy" in the1930s. They were In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. In these threenovels, the author reproduced the living conditions of those agricultural workers by using a plainbut vivid language, and showed a deep concern and compassion for them. Workers Trilogy canbe described as a masterpiece both in artistic and ideological.This master’s thesis mainly analyzes the subaltern and the subaltern narrative on the baseof reading the texts carefully. This paper’s body consists of three parts. The first part focuses onthe characters. The novels’ characters can be described from three aspects which are "thetraumatized""the silent" and "the redeemer". The second part concerns on the narrativestrategies, which mainly analyzes the narrative language, narrative mode and narrative blank.The third part explores the theme implication. The theme multiplicity of Steinbeck’s novels aretalked usually by people. And this paper considers that the theme implications of workers’ trilogyare mainly reflected in three aspects. Revealing characters’ powerlessness in the face of the fate,exploring the relationship between "group" and "individual" and thinking of the"Non-teleological philosophy" are included.