Hooptedoodle

I believe that when Steinbeck used the word, hooptedoodle, he was talking about the intercalary chapters in The Grapes of Wrath. These chapters are important and help to bring depth to the characters, but they are not necessarily important to understanding the story. In the intercalary chapters we get a more in-depth look of the way life was in the 30s, in a more colorful language of the land.

“The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country.”

Then in the narrative chapters we see how the heat is affecting the lives of the Joads. They end up having to leave Oklahoma and move to California to find work.  The intercalary chapters help the reader see the bigger picture of the times and then Steinbeck zooms in on the Joads and shows how the 1930s affected them.

The intercalary chapters also show dramatization as in chapter five.   One of the farmers says, “Three dollars a day. I got damn sick of creeping for my dinner—and not getting it. I got a wife and kids. We got to eat. Three dollars a day, and it comes every day.”  Through this dialogue the reader gets the bigger picture of how the times were tough for everyone, not just the Joads, and how some were not sticking together.

Booth writes, “We should remind ourselves that many dramatized narrators are never explicitly labeled as narrators at all. In a sense, every speech, every gesture, narrates; most works contain disguised narrators who are used to tell the audience what it needs to know, while seeming merely to act out their roles.”

It is through these hooptedoodles that Steinbeck helps the reader feel more in touch with the Joad family and all they are facing with the land and their jobs.