Revista de Letras - Utad

164 Isabel Maria Fernandes Alveswill mark a physical and psychological frontier, for here, they realize, they aregoing to find no garden of Eden, but profit-based absentee ownership of theland, an attitude radically different from the one they knew based on theirintimacy with and knowledge of the land. Here in this scene, Noah, the youngestJoad refuses to leave the river “I ain’t a-gonna leave this here water. I’m a-gonnawalk on down this river” (1987: 228), acting individually, incapable oftransforming himself. When their dreams seem destroyed and pa Joad says:“life’s over an’ done” Ma joad replies: No, it ain’t. Man, he lives in jerks, babyborn an’ a man dies, an’ that’s a jerk- gets a farm an’ loses his farm an’ that’s ajerk. Woman, it’s all one flow, little streams, little eddies, little waterfalls, butthe river, it goes right on” (1987: 467). Later in the novel the presence of rainwill represent a change in Californian society, and better conditions for familiesand communities, and a place where people “eat the stuff they raise an’ live inthe houses they build” (1987: 419). Therefore, the tragedy of the Joads – the lossof family members, the disillusionment, the dislocation – culminates in theirability to harvest a new vision of life and a renovated self.To Steinbeck there exists an intimate relation between travel andknowledge, between journey and discovery; he wants, like Thoreau to front “theessential facts of life”, “to live deep and suck all the marrow of life”, to “knowby experience and be able to give a true account of it” and therefore he regrettedthat America had isolated itself spiritually and physically from nature. With TomJoad (but also with Casy) Steinbeck dramatizes the need to get back to humanistpath, to a more selfless attitude, a spiritual place he reaches after a geographicaljourney from Oklahoma to California.Reading American nature is a journey that enables one to more fullyapprehend the American self. In this case, selves which find a way of enlarginglife by moving metaphorically towards the web of life, just like the spider in oneof Whitman’s poems, a noiseless spider that in order “to explore the vacant, vastsurrounding, /It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself; /”(Whitman 1983: 358). A movement, a journey, which predicts the artists’intricate relationship to American nature: in the quest to understand it, he has tobe it.Moreover, like a geographer searching for a specific topography, the author,discovering nature as self, uncovers essentials about his own identity. On theother hand, the reader, facing the motifs of clouds, streams and paths, doeshopefully build a more acute consciousness of the world around him, not onlythe physical world of natural elements but above all of the relationships betweenhuman experience and the nonhuman world. As literary images, clouds, streamsand paths carry the idea of movement, vitality and dynamism, and are, therefore,an invitation to human imagination. In this sense, many of the natural forms