Hand East of Eden to eight readers and the discussion will reach the same obstacle within twenty minutes. Someone will say that Cathy Ames does not work. She is too thoroughly wicked, too unmotivated, too obviously a device, and the book keeps telling you she was born that way rather than showing you how she became it. The objection is correct on its own terms. What makes the novel interesting is that the text itself keeps undermining the claim, and that the two characters Steinbeck posts beside the action spend six hundred pages arguing the opposite case. Spoilers throughout, up to and including the last page.
The Objection Every East of Eden Reader Raises
Chapter 8 does not ease anyone in. In his own voice, the narrator proposes that some children arrive malformed in the soul exactly as others arrive malformed in the body, a gear out of ratio rather than a life gone wrong. Cathy Ames, he states, came into the world already lacking whatever makes conscience possible. He adds the line that readers remember: “to a monster the norm must seem monstrous”.
Taken at face value this is a disaster for the book. Steinbeck has spent the novel building towards the proposition that every person holds a genuine moral choice, and here he exempts his antagonist from it by biology. If Cathy had no capacity to choose, then the novel’s thesis has a hole in the middle of it shaped exactly like its most important character.
Book clubs tend to stop here, and it is worth not stopping here, because the chapter is the only place in East of Eden where this claim is made. Everywhere else, the novel quietly behaves as though it were untrue.
What the Novel Shows Instead
Watch what East of Eden actually shows her doing. She is frightened of the dark, which is an odd affliction for a creature without an interior. She is cornered by Ethel, a worn-out prostitute with a piece of knowledge, and the blackmail unsettles her badly enough that she sets about having the woman run out of the county. And she keeps morphine where she can reach it, which is something only a person who can picture her own future does.
She uses it, in the end. Before that she signs her property across to Aron, a son she has never met and can gain nothing from. Creatures without inner lives do not draft wills.
The most generous reading is that Steinbeck wrote a narrator who is confidently wrong, and then had the integrity to let his own story contradict him. The less generous reading is that he started with a thesis about innate evil, found it would not survive contact with a character he was writing well, and never went back to fix chapter 8. Both are defensible from the page. The useful move in a discussion is to ask which reading makes the rest of the book better, and the answer is clearly the first.
The Two Men East of Eden Posts Beside the Story
Steinbeck does something unusual with the structure here. He installs two characters whose main function is to watch the Trask family and comment on it, and he gives both of them more moral intelligence than anyone they are watching.
Samuel Hamilton is a well-digger who never made money. He finds water across the whole valley and never strikes it on his own land. He is also the only person willing to say the true thing to Adam Trask, and the lever he uses is the twins’ namelessness, more than a year after their birth. The scene where Samuel finally strikes Adam in the face to wake him up is the moment the first half of the novel turns.
Lee is more interesting still. He arrives speaking pidgin, and when Samuel addresses him as an equal he drops it instantly and explains why he uses it: it is what people expect, and meeting the expectation is easier than correcting it every time. From that point he carries most of the book’s thinking. In a novel published in 1952 by a white American author, giving the Chinese servant the philosophy and the final decisive speech is a choice that deserves more attention than it usually gets.
Both men exist outside the Cain pattern. Neither is a Trask, neither is caught in the inheritance, and that is precisely what qualifies them to argue about whether the inheritance is binding.
Timshel as a Thing Characters Do
The famous kitchen scene in East of Eden is usually quoted as philosophy. It is more useful to a discussion as plot.
Lee reports that four elderly Chinese scholars, the youngest past ninety, hired a rabbi and spent two years on Hebrew in order to settle sixteen verses of Genesis. They found that the translations split. One version issues an order. Another makes a promise, which is to say predestination. The Hebrew offers a choice. Lee’s own verdict is the line worth bringing to a meeting: “But think of the glory of the choice!”
The point for a reader is that this is not a digression. Everything after it is a test of the proposition. Adam is given the choice of seeing his wife clearly and mostly declines it. Cal is given the choice of being his father’s son or his mother’s and spends the back half of the novel in genuine agony over it. Cathy, if the narrator is right about her, is the control: the one person who cannot choose, placed there to show what the alternative looks like.
Cal Trask Is the Character East of Eden Is Really About
Aron gets the love and Cathy gets the attention, but East of Eden belongs to Caleb Trask, and a club that spends its evening on Cathy will miss him.
Cal’s great act of generosity is fifteen thousand dollars, made by speculating on beans while the war drove prices up, offered to a father whose lettuce business has just collapsed. Adam will not take it. He tells Cal to give the money back to the farmers he made it from, and in the same breath praises Aron for getting to Stanford a year early. Cal burns the notes one at a time.
Then comes the act with no way back. Cal walks Aron into the Salinas brothel and lets him see who runs it. His brother signs up within days and dies in France.
What makes Cal the moral centre is that he knows all of this as it happens. He is not a man surprised by his own cruelty. He asks Lee directly whether he is bad by inheritance, and the question is sincere, and it is the question the entire novel exists to answer.
Historical and Social Context
The action of East of Eden runs from the 1860s to 1918 in the Salinas Valley, and the detail is specific rather than decorative: Civil War pension fraud, settlers taking up Salinas Valley land that will not support them, the arrival of refrigerated rail that ruins Adam’s lettuce scheme, and finally the First World War reaching a small California town the way it really did, by telegram.
Steinbeck wrote the novel in 1951, at forty-nine, after a decade in which The Grapes of Wrath had been called propaganda, burned in Kern County, and had earned him the attention of the FBI. He told his editor this was the book he had been preparing for. The timing sharpens the theme. Here is a writer boxed in by a reputation a decade old, spending six hundred pages insisting that no one is obliged to keep being whoever they have already been.
Why the Hamiltons Share the Book
Groups reading East of Eden for the Trask plot often treat the Hamilton chapters as an interruption, and it is worth defending them. The Hamiltons were Steinbeck’s own mother’s family. He puts them in under their real names, and he lets the narrator slip into the first person as one of their grandchildren, so the invented family and the remembered one sit in the same frame.
The effect is a running comparison the reader makes without being told to. Adam Trask inherits money got by fraud and is undone by what he fails to look at. Samuel Hamilton earns almost nothing across a long life and is the most fully alive person in the book. Set side by side, they settle what the novel counts as a successful life, and it is not the one with the money in it.
There is a cost. The Hamilton material thins badly in the later parts, and several of Samuel’s children are introduced and then dropped. A club that finds the middle of the novel slack is noticing something real rather than failing to pay attention.
Questions Worth Bringing to a Meeting
A few that reliably open the book up rather than closing it down.
- Is the narrator of chapter 8 wrong about Cathy, and does it matter whether Steinbeck knew he was wrong?
- Samuel and Lee both tell Adam the truth. Why does only one of them get through?
- Cal asks whether he is bad by birth. Does the ending answer him, or only permit him to find out?
- If East of Eden is an argument for free will, what is Aron for?
- Who in this novel actually changes, as opposed to being told they could?
- Lee is the cleverest person in the book and spends it cooking and keeping house for a man who
is not his equal. Is that the novel’s blind spot, or its point?
How East of Eden Ends, and What Adam Gives
Adam is dying. Lee asks him to bless the son who caused his other son’s death, and does not soften it: he says outright that the guilt on Cal is close to past bearing, and asks his friend not to abandon the boy to it. Adam’s hand rises an inch, then drops back.
Then he says one word. Timshel.
Notice what he withholds. There is no forgiveness in it and no prediction attached to it. Adam does not say the boy is good, or that he will become good, or that the dead son is avenged by the living one. He does not forgive Cal, and he does not promise anything about his future. He gives him permission to choose, which is all the novel has ever claimed one person can hand another. Read against Cathy, who was supposedly born without that capacity, the final word is also the book’s answer to its own weakest chapter. Whatever the narrator believed in chapter 8, the story ends by insisting that the choice is real and that it can be given away.
Groups that enjoy this kind of argument will find the same shape in our analyses of The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice, both novels whose narrators are worth doubting.
That is why East of Eden survives its flaws. It is a novel that argues with itself in public and lets the better argument win on the last page.
Read from the Penguin paperback, the 1979 impression. Viking issued the novel first, in 1952, and a Viking Compass edition followed in 1970.