The most striking and pervasive style used in these intercalary chapters is language and rhythms reminiscent of the syntactical structures of the King James Bible. With its force and authority, this biblical voice, present in both the opening description of the drought and the closing description of the floods, becomes the moral center of the novel. The spiritual beauty and strength of this language is most clearly seen in the apocalyptic warning delivered in Chapter 25, "There is a crime here which goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange."
Separately, these intercalary chapters have moments of brilliance and beauty. However, it is the way in which they are intricately, and inextricably, woven into the fabric of the primary narrative that they most confirm the genius of Steinbeck's highly personal and global vision of humanity.
