The novel's final scene, Rose of Sharon nursing a starving stranger after her own baby is stillborn, is one of the most debated endings in American literature, and student reactions to it tend to split sharply: some read it as a powerful, transcendent act of compassion and collective survival, others find it strange, uncomfortable, or even an unsatisfying resolution to the Joads' story. Both reactions can produce strong essays if grounded well in the text.

Because this scene is genuinely ambiguous, and because Steinbeck himself faced criticism for the choice, this is one of the rare essay topics on this novel where there isn't a clearly correct or expected interpretation, which means grading needs to focus entirely on the quality of textual support rather than whether a student's reading matches a presumed correct answer.

A weak essay on this scene either avoids taking a real position, hedging between multiple readings without committing to an argument, or takes a position without grounding it in specific textual details from the final chapters, relying instead on general emotional reaction to the scene's content.

A strong essay commits to an interpretation, whether that the ending is hopeful, unsettling, or deliberately unresolved, and defends it using specific details: the smile Rose of Sharon gives, the novel's final line, the connection back to earlier moments of maternal imagery and communal care established throughout the text.

Grading Divergent Interpretations Fairly

Because this scene genuinely supports multiple defensible readings, it's important that a rubric reward argument quality and textual grounding rather than any specific conclusion, a student arguing the ending is uncomfortably ambiguous rather than triumphantly hopeful should be able to earn full marks if the argument is well supported.

• Does the essay commit to a clear interpretation rather than hedging between multiple readings without resolution?
• Does the argument cite specific textual details from the final scene (the smile, the final line, the setting) rather than general impression?
• Does the essay connect the ending back to earlier moments of maternal imagery or communal care established earlier in the novel?
• Does the essay address the scene's discomfort or strangeness honestly, rather than glossing over the more unsettling elements?
• Is the interpretation defensible even if a reader disagrees with it, given the evidence provided?

Encouraging Interpretive Commitment Without Discouraging Nuance

There's a meaningful difference between an essay that avoids committing to any position and one that commits to a nuanced position, arguing, for instance, that the ending is both hopeful and unsettling simultaneously. The rubric should distinguish between these two: genuine nuance that still makes a defensible claim should be rewarded, while pure hedging that never actually argues anything should not.

This distinction is worth modeling directly with sample thesis statements, showing students what a nuanced but still committed thesis looks like versus one that avoids taking any real position at all.

Handling Discomfort With the Scene's Content Directly

Some students find this scene's content genuinely uncomfortable to discuss, and it's worth acknowledging that discomfort directly as part of the analytical conversation rather than treating it as an obstacle to work around. An essay that engages honestly with why the scene is jarring, and what that jarring quality might be doing rhetorically, often demonstrates more sophisticated thinking than one that treats the scene as straightforwardly beautiful without acknowledging its strangeness.

Providing space for this honest reaction, rather than implicitly signaling that only a reverent reading of the scene is acceptable, tends to produce more genuine and more analytically interesting student writing.

Using This Essay as the Unit's Capstone Discussion

Because this scene synthesizes so many of the novel's major threads, maternal sacrifice, collective survival, the tension between individual and communal identity, an essay on the ending works well as a capstone assignment that asks students to draw on everything they've analyzed across the unit rather than treating the final scene in isolation.

Framing the assignment this way, explicitly inviting students to bring in earlier essays' analytical threads, tends to produce richer final essays than treating the ending as a standalone, disconnected topic.