The preacher - Jim Casy - has got to be one of my favorite characters in this entire book. I like Tom, too, but not as much as I like Jim, and this is why.
For starters, his enthusiasm and excitement for all the new ideas he thinks about and comes up with is contagious. It makes me want to be enthusiastic about things (which I already am very enthusiastic, so you can imagine how he makes me feel), and I love characters that make me want to do things. I kind of relate to Casy in this way, and also in the way that he thinks deeply about things. I'm a pretty religious person, but my mind also tends to wander to other possibilities like Casy's does (only I don't change my views very much or very often, I just think about it). Deep thinking is a forte for both of us, and it makes him easier to like.
I also like how he tends to bring the conversations he has always back to the main thing he is thinking about. In this chapter, for instance, Tom continually tries to talk about other things, but Casy always manages to bring the subject back to his time as a preacher and his new outlook on life. I tend to do this as well, and frankly, when he continued to do this in the chapter, I kind of laughed a little bit.
If there is one thing I don't like about Casy, though, it is his appearance. That's kind of shallow, but I like his personality, so I guess it isn't. He just sounds really, really, unattractive. Steinbeck describes him as having "a long head, bony, tight of skin, and set on a neck as stringy and muscular as a celery stalk." Maybe it's just my dislike of celery biasing my opinion there, but whatever. It goes on to say that his eyes are "heavy and protruding" and his nose is "beaked and hard" and stretches the skin "so tightly that the bridge showed white." His forehead is "abnormally high... lined with delicate blue veins at the temples."
Yeah, not the most attractive person. I still love him though!
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