In Dubious Battle Sacrifice Quotes

Some people are just not willing to be a Mac or Jim for the cause. Dakin's situation, though hardly luxurious, seems pretty comfortable to those on the outside: he has a shiny new truck, a fancy tent, and lots of swell camping equipment, plus a sweet wife and kids. In short, Dakin has a lot to lose, and he knows it. While he's willing to lend a hand, he's not willing to get dirty. Newsflash for Dakin: in this game, he has to go big or go home. His emotional involvement in his own life makes it impossible for him to tough out the rough stuff and be a true leader.

Mac's banter with Jim is meant to ease his new friend's mind about getting his chance to make a difference in the world. But in hindsight, it's more than a bit chilling. Mac knows that every Party member has to be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, but sometimes that isn't just death. In some ways, the bigger sacrifice is giving up ordinary humanity—which Jim is already in the process of doing.

At this point, Al sympathizes with Mac and Jim but feels that he's caught between a rock and a hard place: he can't really support a cause that destroys his bread and butter. As a business owner, Al has to stay on the right side of the law, and in Torgas Valley, that happens to be the Growers' Association. Al represents the situation of the greater part of society in this work: he's not suffering directly, but he wants to help. And yet, his desire to protect his own comfort makes it impossible for him to truly throw his weight behind a cause.

Joy's gruesome assassination at the train depot highlights the expendability of human life in this work. Joy himself had great zeal for the cause and set the value of his life at almost nothing in the face of his work. Even his comrades in arms didn't think much of Joy's suffering—it was just the byproduct of his irrational tendencies and his love of scrapping with the law. But his unexpected and unlooked-for martyrdom counts tremendously because it is shocking and perfectly timed. The drama of the death of the little man stirs public sympathy and riles the workers—at least for a minute.

Anderson rightly complains about his son's losses, but Mac has no problem pushing back. The cause is too righteous and valuable. Throughout the book, both Mac and Jim lament the difficulty of getting the average man to understand the value of working for something bigger, something that will benefit an entire country rather than just one individual. At the moment, Mac's anger seems justified: what's the sacrifice of a crummy lunch wagon and a few broken ribs compared to fair wages and improved working conditions for everyone? It seems like a no-brainer—until worse things begin to happen.

Mac pontificates on the reality of sacrifice in the service of an ideology. It's all grins and giggles, he says, until a business gets burned to the ground and people get beaten. While things are about to get even worse for the Andersons, Mac reminds himself (and Jim and the reader) that sometimes we have to look past our own comfort for the greater good, no matter how hard it can be. Problem is, Mac and Jim are guys with nothing to lose. They might feel sympathy for the Andersons, but they don't feel the loss with them.

The concept of sacrificing one's goods or comfort for the cause just took a creepy turn. Mac tells Doc Burton that every cause has to offer a sacrificial lamb if it is going to succeed. The creepy thing? Mac doesn't really have a problem with this. Even though he has many revolutionary ideas about how to change labor in the U.S., Mac is perfectly willing to conform to this age-old saw about personal sacrifice.

Jim tries to explain what it feels like to be part of something bigger than he is. Because he's pretty much left his humanity behind, Jim feels fairly comfortable giving the cause every ounce of his blood. His belief is that his blood will fuel the cause until it catches on and takes hold. It doesn't matter if he lives to see it happen, as long as he has a small part in it. Jim's declaration is equal parts chilling and selfless.

Jim explains why he lacks Mac's sympathy for Anderson, who has just lost his barn, crop, and dogs in a fire. Jim's hopeless and violent home life quashed any spark of human emotion there might have been in him. He often recalls the miserable death of his mother when asked about his motivations. Her life and her death were a capitulation to the misery that surrounded them. Jim plans to make a different kind of sacrifice to change the world.

In the end, Jim gives up more than his life for the Party: he gives up his identity. His gruesome murder symbolically wipes out his identifying characteristics, so much so that we soon see Mac treating his corpse like the body of any other worker who dies while resisting oppression, rather than as his fallen comrade and BFF. It's about as depressing an ending as Steinbeck could have written—and he's pretty darn good at depressing endings.