The closing scene of The Grapes of Wrath, in which Rose of Sharon breastfeeds a dying stranger after losing her own child, is one of the most analyzed and debated endings in American literary fiction, and essay assignments built around it tend to produce a wide range of legitimate interpretations. Some students read the scene as a hopeful affirmation of human compassion transcending personal tragedy, while others read it as a bleak commentary on the total collapse of individual identity under relentless suffering. Because both readings can be persuasively argued with solid textual evidence, grading these essays fairly requires a rubric built around the quality of argument rather than agreement with any single interpretation. Teachers who unconsciously favor one reading over another risk penalizing students for a defensible position simply because it differs from their own.

A rubric for this assignment should explicitly state that credit is based on the strength of argument and evidence, not on which interpretation of the ending a student chooses to defend. This means building descriptors that reward specificity and textual grounding regardless of thesis direction, such as close attention to Rose of Sharon's facial expression as described in the final lines, or the symbolic weight of the barn setting after the family's long journey toward California's promised abundance. Making this evaluative neutrality explicit in the assignment sheet itself, not just in the teacher's private grading approach, helps students feel confident pursuing a genuinely original reading rather than guessing at what interpretation the teacher secretly prefers.

It also helps to require that students engage with at least one plausible counterargument to their own reading, since the ending's genuine ambiguity makes this a natural and appropriate expectation rather than an artificial rubric requirement. An essay arguing for the hopeful reading, for instance, gains credibility when it acknowledges and responds to the darker interpretation, showing the student has considered the scene's full complexity rather than simply latching onto the first reading that occurred to them. This requirement, stated clearly in the rubric, tends to produce more sophisticated essays overall, since grappling with counterargument is itself a marker of stronger critical thinking regardless of the specific topic.

Evaluating Symbolic Analysis of the Final Scene

The final scene is dense with symbolic detail, from the flood outside to the specific physical staging of the barn interior, and strong essays typically engage with more than one of these symbolic layers rather than focusing narrowly on the breastfeeding image alone. A rubric category addressing symbolic analysis should reward essays that connect the ending's imagery back to patterns established earlier in the novel, such as the recurring motif of nourishment and hunger that runs throughout the Joad family's journey. Essays that treat the final scene in isolation, without connecting it to this larger pattern, often miss an opportunity for a richer, more textually supported argument, and feedback should point students toward this kind of connection explicitly.

• A thesis that takes a clear position on the ending's meaning, supported by specific textual evidence
• Engagement with at least one plausible counterargument to the student's chosen interpretation
• Connection between the final scene's imagery and symbolic patterns established earlier in the novel
• Attention to specific textual detail, such as physical description and dialogue, not just plot summary
• A conclusion that considers the broader implications of the student's reading for the novel's themes

Common Weaknesses in Ending Analysis Essays

One frequent weakness in these essays is a thesis that avoids taking a real position, hedging with language like "the ending could be interpreted multiple ways" without ultimately committing to a specific argument the rest of the essay can support. While acknowledging ambiguity is appropriate, and even encouraged as discussed above, an essay still needs to stake out a defensible claim about which reading it finds most persuasive and why. Feedback on essays that hedge excessively should push students to commit to a position, reminding them that acknowledging complexity and refusing to argue a specific point are not the same thing, even though students sometimes conflate the two under the mistaken belief that neutrality is safer.

A second common weakness is treating the scene's ambiguity as evidence that the novel itself is poorly resolved or unfinished, rather than recognizing that the ambiguity is likely an intentional authorial choice worth analyzing on its own terms. Essays that criticize the ending for being "confusing" or "unclear" without considering why Steinbeck might have deliberately resisted a tidy resolution are missing an opportunity to engage with the text's actual literary strategy. Redirecting students toward the question of why an author might choose ambiguity, rather than treating ambiguity as a flaw to be criticized, often produces significantly stronger essays when this reframing happens before the drafting stage.

Supporting Genuine Interpretive Risk-Taking

Because this ending is so widely discussed, students sometimes default to whatever interpretation they encountered first in outside research or class discussion, rather than developing their own close reading of the actual text. Encouraging genuine interpretive risk-taking, and grading in a way that visibly rewards it, helps counter this tendency toward borrowed conclusions. A rubric note explicitly stating that original, well supported readings will be valued as highly as more conventional interpretations, provided both are equally well argued, gives students explicit permission to trust their own close reading rather than defaulting to whatever consensus view feels safest to reproduce.

In-class discussion before the essay is assigned can also help surface a range of interpretive possibilities without prescribing a single correct reading, giving students more raw material to draw from when developing their own argument. A discussion format where students first articulate their own initial reaction to the ending, before hearing other interpretations, tends to protect a wider diversity of thesis directions in the eventual essays compared to a discussion that begins by presenting established critical interpretations first. This ordering matters more than it might initially seem, since students are often quick to adopt whichever reading is presented as authoritative early in a discussion.

Why This Kind of Grading Fairness Matters

Grading fairly on a genuinely ambiguous text teaches students something important about literary interpretation itself, namely that strong analysis is judged by the quality of reasoning and evidence rather than by matching a predetermined correct answer. This lesson matters well beyond this single assignment, since students carry the expectation of a single "right" interpretation into future literary analysis if their early experiences train them to guess at teacher preference rather than build independent arguments. A rubric explicitly built around evaluative neutrality, applied consistently to an assignment as interpretively open as this one, models exactly the kind of intellectual honesty literary study should be teaching.

Teachers who grade this assignment well, rewarding rigor and evidence over agreement with a personal favorite reading, often find it becomes one of the most memorable and engaging assignments of the entire unit for students, precisely because it treats their interpretive judgment as genuinely valuable rather than as an exercise in guessing the teacher's opinion. This kind of engagement tends to produce essays students are more invested in, since they are arguing a position they actually formed themselves rather than reproducing an expected answer. That investment often shows up in the quality and specificity of the writing, making this a high-value assignment worth the extra care that fair, neutral grading requires.