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영어

This paper aims to make a comparative study of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain in order to discuss the purpose and limitations of social protest novels. In the 1930s during the Great Depression, the story of the Joads, a representative of the migrant workers who dreamed of moving to California, was continued in Boyle’s work to convey similar events happening to immigrant workers in modern times. To describe similar events that have occurred to immigrant workers in the past, I describe not only the difficulties of illegal immigrants through Boyle’s characters, the Rincons but also the exaggerated privilege of white people through the Mossbachers in contemporary California. Like Steinbeck, Boyle reveals their harrowing realities. Both Steinbeck and Boyle were criticized for their publications, but in their own times, Steinbeck and Boyle carried out their ultimate goal of social protest novels as an appeal for social change even if there was no such solution.