Grapes of Wrath & Old Man and the Sea

So far, out of reading the novels Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and Robert DeMott and Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, Grapes of Wrath was definitely my favorite. Not only did I give it a higher rating on a five star scale, but I also liked way more things about this book than the other. One thing about this novel that I preferred over the other was the characters. There were a lot more characters in Grapes of Wrath, which added much more interest to the story. The more characters there were, the more interaction there was. The interaction of the different characters made it less boring because there was more going on. It made your mind work a little bit more, totally in a good way. Old Man and the Sea was lacking in this kind of interest because there were so few characters. Another aspect of Grapes of Wrath that I really enjoyed was the feeling, as a reader, that I was going on the journey with the Joad family. You are exposed to everything: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The reader is along for every twist and turn of the entire trip to California. Nothing skips forward or bypasses any details; it is as if you are a part of the family. While reading Old Man and the Sea, I did not get that same experience. Old Man and the Sea was a lot less complicated than Grapes of Wrath because it was about one man with one goal during one journey. The plot was very simple. With Grapes of Wrath, on the other hand, it was an entire nation of people--specifically one large family--that had many different goals, and the consequences were much greater. There was more on the line in this story as compared to the story in Old Man and the Sea. I guess I really liked how Grapes of Wrath had a lot more diversity, and it was based on the real stories of families during the time period.