120 marks
Section A — American Literature 1880–1940
Read the following extract, from 'The Grain Elevator' (written for this paper, set in Kansas, 1931).
The dust came in at noon. Ruth saw it first as a brown line under the sky, like the edge of a blanket somebody was pulling over the whole county. By the time she had the washing in, the line had become a wall.
Her father came up from the fields walking slow, the way he walked now, as if the land had got heavier. He did not look at the sky. He looked at the house, and at her, and at the boards he had nailed across the east windows the week before.
'Bank man came by,' he said.
Ruth folded a shirt. The cotton was warm and smelled of the wind. 'What did he want?'
'Same as last time.' Her father sat on the step and took off his hat and turned it in his hands. 'Says the elevator's paying twenty-five cents. Says that's the market.' He laughed, a dry sound. 'Market. Like it's weather. Like nobody makes it.'
The wall of dust reached the barn and swallowed it. Then the light went brown, and then it went out.
Discuss ways in which the writer presents hardship and the failure of the American Dream in this extract. In your answer you should consider the writer's use of narrative techniques and make connections with ideas and contexts from your wider reading in this topic area.