Read the following excerpt from chapter 21 of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
Those families which had lived on a little piece of land, who had
lived and died on forty acres, had eaten or starved on the
produce of forty acres, had now the whole West to rove in. And
they scampered about, looking for work; and the highways were
streams of people, and the ditch banks were lines of people.
Behind them more were coming. The great highways streamed
with moving people. There in the Middle and Southwest had lived
a simple agrarian folk who had not changed with industry, who
had not farmed with machines or known the power and danger
of machines in private hands. They had not grown up in the
paradoxes of industry. Their senses were still sharp to the
ridiculousness of the industrial life.
And then suddenly the machines pushed them out and they
swarmed on the highways. The movement changed them; the
highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the
hunger itself, changed them. The children without dinner
changed them, the endless moving changed them. They were
migrants. And the hostility changed them, welded them, united
them-hostility that made the little towns group and arm as
though to repel an invader, squads with pick handles, clerks and
storekeepers with shotguns, guarding the world against their own
people.
Analyze how the author uses the rhetorical devices of parallelism and diction to
convey the tone of the text. Be sure to include specific details from the text to
support your answer.