Abstract:

With the increasing destruction of the natural environment, the ecological balance is being broken, people gradually realize that the destruction of nature will hurt human beings. This paper mainly studies John Steinbeck’s work The Grapes of Wrath. This work describes the unprecedented ecological disaster—sandstorm, which is caused by the excessive development of land, and profoundly reveals the poor living situations and mental state of American farmers. The paper tries to explore the ideological root behind the ecological disaster in the works and focuses on the description of the three Natural Men and discusses how they get positive spirit in trouble and how they return to the spiritual home.

Key words: the Nature Man; The Grapes of Wrath; ecological ethics

摘要：

随着自然环境日益被破坏，生态平衡正在被打破，人们越来越意识到对自然的破坏最终伤害人类自己。本文主要研究约翰·斯坦贝克的著名作品《愤怒的葡萄》。作品描述了由于土地的过度开发而引起的史无前例的生态灾难——沙尘暴，深刻揭示了贫苦失地的美国农民的生存现状以及精神状态。本文尽力探寻作品中生态灾难背后的思想根源，并着重描写文章中的三个“自然人”形象，探讨他们如何在困境中获得积极向上的精神力量，坚守精神家园。

关键词：自然人；《愤怒的葡萄》；生态伦理

Introduction
The Grapes of Wrath, the representative work of John Steinbeck was published in 1939. It is a special work in America literary history. This work has a wide range of research at home and abroad. “This work can be regarded as a great work of eco-literature”. [1]98
 The famous novel The Grapes of Wrath is a very important novel and is considered to be one of the twenty books that have changed the USA. As a great writer with profound awareness of ecological crisis and the ecological thought, Steinbeck did not only express the concerns of ecological crisis in the novel, he was also trying to find ways to solve the crisis. In order to solve the crisis of natural ecology, Steinbeck called on people’s return to nature and reverence for the land. In order to solve the social ecological crisis, he called on people to help each other. In order to solve the crisis of spiritual ecology, he advocated universal love spirit in people’s heart. Steinbeck expressed if humans change from only care about themselves to care about others, they will find refuge for soul. This paper is divided into three parts.
Part one mainly focuses on literature overview which contains a brief introduction to Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath and an introduction of ecological criticism which deals with the relationship between man and nature, man and society and man and self.