As well as understanding the need for others, author, John Steinbeck, also realizes many other components of human nature. Steinbeck sees that trials bring people closer together and make them stronger. He also sees that people are designed for so much more than just surviving. Humans are designed to thrive. People are made to live for a greater purpose, other than just eating and sleeping.
In the 1930's, many American families had been kicked out of their homes, were forced to find other work, other places to live, and figure out how to get food. The poor people of America were struggling. However, they came together through it all. Steinbeck illustrates how people come together through tough times. Talking of migrant camps that migrant workers set up, Steinbeck says,
"In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families become one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream. And it might be that a sick child threw despair into the hearts of twenty families, of a hundred people; that a birth there in a tent kept a hundred people quiet and awestruck through the night and filled a hundred people with the birth-joy in the morning. A family which the night before had been lost and fearful might search its goods to find a present for a new baby. In the evening, sitting about the fires, the twenty were one. They grew to be units of the camps, units of the evenings and the nights." (Steinbeck 193-194)
Steinbeck says in chapter fourteen, "The last clear definite function of man-muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need-this is man." (Steinbeck 150)
As you can see, Steinbeck realizes that humans are made for more than simple things. We have an aching to do more. He says we ache to create beyond the single need. That is saying we want to do more than just live off of our basic needs. We have an aching to live for more and live for a higher purpose and a greater calling.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print.
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