Post #2       (1-10)

Sub-topic G- conflicts in the novel (Man against Machine)

This was largely covered in class, still it is worth going into with somewhat more detail.

"The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man" (35)

Set up here with this quote is the underlying emotion of what can be construed as horror at the way once immersed in a mechanized world, man looses his humanity. This is not a quote of triumph of one over the other, but it is the depiction of an aberrational relationship between a creation of god and a creation of a creation of god. This unholy relationship maybe seen by the farmers in the book to be the tool of a 'monster' that is driving them into oblivion.

"The tractor cut a straight line on, and the air and the ground vibrated with its thunder" (39)

This quote seems to be set up the way it is in the passage on page 38 and into 39 to show that the opposition of man as an individual against a man/machine hybrid is useless. This shows that at the direction of men, machines, used as tools, are un-opposable by the individual and that the only option available to survive this conflict is to flee. It is this broken conviction that will force many families west, and gives the book an interesting parallel in its period of industrialization driving away farmers as farmers drove away settlers who drove away the natives.