Soft fingers began to tap the sill of the car window, and hard fingers tightened on the restless drawing sticks. In the doorways of the sun-beaten tenant houses, women sighed and then shifted feet so that the one that had been down was now on top, and the toes working. Dogs came sniffing near the owner cars and wetted on all four tires one after another. And chickens lay in the sunny dust and fluffed their feathers to get the cleansing dust down to the skin. In the little sties the pigs grunted inquiringly over the muddy remnants of the slops.

The squatting men looked down again. What do you want us to do? We can't take less share of the crop—we're half starved now. The kids are hungry all the time. We got no clothes, torn an' ragged. If all the neighbors weren't the same, we'd be ashamed to go to meeting.

And at last the owner men came to the point. The tenant system won't work any more. One man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen families. Pay him a wage and take all the crop. We have to do it. We don't like to do it. But the monster's sick. Something's happened to the monster.

But you'll kill the land with cotton.

We know. We've got to take cotton quick before the land dies. Then we'll sell the land. Lots of families in the East would like to own a piece of land.

The tenant men looked up alarmed. But what'll happen to us? How'll we eat?

In this excerpt from John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, about tenant farmers in the Great Depression, some businessmen are explaining to tenant farmers that they're about to get even poorer, basically.

In this passage we'll find one of the Naturalists' favorite themes. And that's poverty, of course. The Naturalists were very interested in depicting characters that live in situations of extreme economic deprivation.

The tenant farmers in this passage are seriously poor. They're so poor, they don't have enough to eat, and they don't have decent clothes. And these poor people are being told that they're probably going to end up poorer, now that the land they farm is going to be cultivated and sold off by the big businessmen. Yikes.

This excerpt from The Grapes of Wrath is a great example of the narrative tone that Naturalists often employ in their writing. Notice how clinical the tone is here. In the first paragraph, for instance, the narrator just describes the scene, without commenting on it: "Dogs came sniffing near the owner cars and wetted on all four tires one after another. And chickens lay in the sunny dust and fluffed their feathers to get the cleansing dust down to the skin."

The voice in this excerpt is detached: it shows its readers what's going on but it doesn't judge what's happening. We readers are the ones who are meant to arrive at our own interpretation through the "facts" that the narrator presents us with.

This detached, clinical narrative tone is a staple of Naturalist fiction. If the world is cruel and relentless and detached, figured the Naturalists, then it was a writer's job to write in the same manner as the world operated.

Ugh, and they didn't even have cute puppy videos to take their minds off the relentless apathetic cruelty of the world like we do today.