EAST OF EDEN Summary - Riassunto libro - Easter, 1916 PDF

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EAST OF EDEN SUMMARY How It All Goes Down Our first ill-fated family is the Trasks: there's Cyrus, a brief soldier for the Union who is obsessed with the army, and his two sons, Adam and Charles. Adam is the more beloved by his father, despite being softer, but Charles craves his father's love and doesn't get it—and on one occasion he takes his anger out on Adam. Cyrus forces Adam into the cavalry, while Charles stays home and takes over the farm. After Cyrus's death, the brothers learn that Cyrus left them a suspiciously large amount of money. By chance Adam and Charles come across Cathy, a manipulative, sexual, and (secretly) evil woman. Charles understands the kind of person she really is, but Adam builds her up into his perfect Eve. He marries her and takes her to California, where he buys a nice big ranch. This is where Adam meets Samuel Hamilton, an IrishAmerican farmer and intellectual with a large family, a heart of gold, and a lot of bad luck when it comes to making money. He and his family appear throughout the plot. Cathy learns that she is pregnant, but after giving birth to twin boys she up and leaves to go be a prostitute in the town of Salinas. The realization that Cathy is a completely different person than he imagined her to be shocks Adam, and it takes him a while to recover. In the meantime, the boys, Aron and Caleb (Cal), are raised by Adam's highly-overqualified Chinese-American servant, Lee, who pretty much runs the show when he's not thinking philosophical thoughts. The boys grow up, and eventually Adam moves the family to Salinas. Aron develops a relationship with his childhood crush, Abra, while Cal is dark, clever, and restless. Adam clearly favors Aron, who is super naïve and religious. Aron can't stand the dirtiness of the world, and he also really couldn't care less about his father's opinion of him. Cal, on the other hand, loves his father and wishes that he would love him back. Cal also learns the truth about his mother (Adam had told the boys that she was dead), but doesn't tell Aron. When Adam loses most of his money in a failed refrigeration scheme, Cal decides to make it back and buy his father's love. He goes about it by taking advantage of the U.S.'s entry into World War I and the rising price of beans. When Aron is back home from college, Cal gives his father the money. Far from being pleased, Adam is disappointed that Cal used the war to make a profit. In his anger and jealousy, Cal takes Aron to their mother's whorehouse (side plot: Cathy took over the house after murdering the previous madam). Aron can't handle the dirty truth, and enlists in the army. Adam has a minor stroke when he finds out. Cal is wracked with guilt over his actions. Eventually Aron is killed in the war, and Adam suffers a major stroke that leaves him paralyzed. But Lee has Adam give Cal his fatherly blessing nonetheless, and Adam's last word represents the choice all of them have to not be re-makes of their Cain-Abel heritage.

East of Eden Themes

Family When you talk about keeping it all in the family, usually you aren't talking about family curses. And while lots of people have a love-hate relationship with their family, most of us don't feel compelled to kill our brother over our father's love. So East of Eden is kind of extreme. In addition to having all that baggage, the second generation of Trasks also get to deal with the fear that they have inherited something more than arthritis from their parents: Cal is worried that he's evil like Kate, and Aron remarks at one point that he looks like Charles. And you thought your family was bad.

Jealousy We've got all the ingredients for a delicious jealousy pie in East of Eden, which makes sense since it's based on of the original master recipes for jealousy—the story of Cain hating Abel for getting God this amazing steak while Cain's gardening skills go completely unnoticed. That's the kind of jealousy that leaves a mark (literally, on Cain's face), but in addition to polar opposite siblings, we've also got a generous dash of fatherly favoritism in the mix, too. Stir it all together and let it rise for a couple of generations, and you've got yourself one hot jealous mess.

Love Wouldn't it be great if we could just buy another person's love? It sounds ridiculous, but people in East of Eden try to do it all the time. From Charles's birthday gift for his father to Adam's mini-paradise that he tries to build for Cathy, we see that people are really desperate for love. And when they don't get it? It's not pretty. The fear of not being loved is really at the core of this story—and, according to Lee, it's at the core of all humanity too. Love is a big deal.

Sex Steinbeck is all about stripping away taboos when it comes to talking about s-e-x. None of that oh-my-gosh-an-ankle stuffiness of the past here, folks; nope—think of him as the Salt-nPepa of the 1950s. But all the talk about sex and whores (so many whores) isn't just for cheap thrills—it's really important to the plot in East of Eden, too. After all, Cathy is the one who actually acknowledges how sex affects people, while everyone else around her twiddles their thumbs and plays innocent. And Aron's refusal to get anywhere near the subject of sex means that he's in for the shock of his life when he can't bury his head in the sand anymore.

Fate and Free Will Write this down: East of Eden hinges on the word timshel. That's it. That's the entire explanation. As Lee points out, timshel is a Hebrew word meaning thou mayest, and it's in the original story of Genesis when God promises Cain that if he does well, he will be rewarded, and if he doesn't, well, too bad. So it's this whole idea of choice: Cain doesn't have to get all mad and kill Abel—just like Cal doesn't have to ruin his brother's image of their mom. At the same time, there is this underlying worry in the novel that the Cain and Abel story will somehow repeat itself.

Good vs. Evil Here is the breakdown: Story of Genesis = How Evil Enters the World. Afterward, good and evil are constantly duking it out, and in East of Eden we've got front-row seats to the fight. Sometimes, though, we don't even know which side we're rooting for. For example, why do we find Aron's innocence insufferable and root for Cal to tell him about Mommy Dearest? Why do we cheer when Cathy blasts through Adam's idealized vision of her by shooting him en route to applying for a job as a whore? Good and evil themselves might seem black and white, but how they are used is a lot more complicated.

Memory and the Past Remember the good old days when a stick of gum was a nickel and every single thing was better? Or remember back in our day when you had to walk ten miles to school in the snow uphill both ways? Nostalgia and contrasting the past with the present is a huge part of East of Eden. It's not just something you do while sitting out on your front porch in a rocking chair—it affects how people act, how they think about themselves, and how they think about other people. The past colors peoples's opinions of the present, so how they choose to remember it is a pretty big deal.

Innocence By innocence we mean two things: Adam and Aron. Aron is his father's son through and through: he doesn't give two hoots for the opinion of his own father, and he is a sucker who just can't see the bad in the world. While the Cain brothers, Charles and Cal, are clever enough to know a bad egg when they see one (and not be too bothered by it) in East of Eden, the Abel brothers are horrified when they learn that the world is not as pure and pristine and good as they had made it out to be. Naïve is an appropriate word here.

Contrasting Regions—East vs. West If you're going to title your book East of Eden, you're implying that there's a West, too. This novel loves to work the East-West thing: Back East (Connecticut) versus the Wild Wild West (California), East as in Lee's Orient versus West as in Samuel's Irish-Americanism, and of course "east of Eden" as in where the biblical Cain is banished to after killing Abel. But direction is a little complicated: Adam goes west to find his Eden, while Lee figuratively goes east when his Chinese parents come to America. It's enough to make your head—and compass—spin around a bit.

ANALYSIS: SETTING Salinas Valley, California Yes, yes—we know that the first part of the novel takes place in Connecticut, but that's largely just setting the stage for when the action moves to the Eden of the story, i.e. that Paradise that is the California Central Valley.

Historically, when the United States was being settled in the nineteenth century, California was seen as the endpoint to Manifest Destiny, which was the idea that God had decreed that the United States would span from coast to coast on the continent. So California has a history of being a kind of Promised Land for Americans. The fact that this area of the country is known for producing tons of produce also helps give it an Eden-esque flavor, so it's an appropriate place to set a re-telling of Genesis. If you haven't already, now might be a good time to take a look at our discussion of the Garden of Eden in the "Symbols" section get a clearer understanding of its relevance to the story this book tells (or re-tells, and then re-tells some more). There's also some good stuff in the "Themes" and "What's Up With the Title?" sections, if you want to peek around a bit. We're happy to wait. Okay, ready? Onward. Aficionados of John Steinbeck won't see anything weird about East of Eden's setting. Steinbeck grew up in Salinas (as we see in the novel itself) and pretty much everything he wrote takes place in the Central Valley: The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row… the man doesn't exactly venture far from home. But hey— they do say to write about what you know.

ANALYSIS: GENRE Family Drama If you were to summarize East of Eden in one sentence, you would have to mention that it's about the Trasks and the Hamiltons. After all, this novel is riffing off of one of the oldest family dramas we have: the story of the original biblical family. Turns out not a whole lot has changed. We've got jealousy, violence, lies—you know, family matters. It's no wonder that all of the tension in the Trask household comes to a head at Thanksgiving dinner. It's not just that there is drama between characters that happen to be family members; the drama is there because they are family. Cal wouldn't be jealous of Aron over Adam unless they were brothers. Aron wouldn't be upset about Kate unless she was his mother. They say that blood is thicker than water, but these characters probably wish that they could dilute it some.

Tragedy In its most basic sense, a tragedy is sad. We mean really sad, as in it builds you up just to let you down. And something can't really be truly sad unless the ending is sad. Though the ending of East of Eden isn't totally hopeless, it does end in two dead bodies, so it's not exactly happy. But there is more to it than that. Way long ago, smart Greek dudes like Aristotle said that good tragedy has a main character who is fated to fall, as in, no matter what he does things are going to end badly for him (womp womp).

One question stewing in the back of our minds as we read East of Eden is whether or not it's inevitable that Cal will tell Aron about Kate and send him into a suicidal fit. We know that he's almost always fighting the urge to do it (but let's face it—we also totally want to see him do it), and we know that Lee keeps on insisting to him that he has a choice (remember that whole timshel thing?), but at the same time we know that this wouldn't be a good Cain and Abelallegory unless we get to see some fratricide. So is it really inevitable? Take a peek at our "What's Up with the Ending?" section if you want to think about it some more.

Mythology Lastly, let's talk myths. For our purposes, we're treating the story of Genesis as a creation myth rather than a religion (though we totally acknowledge that it is). But the point here, and in East of Eden, is to think of Genesis as a symbolic story that says something about our human nature. After all, that's what myths do, and why the same tropes keep appearing over and over again (just ask James Frazier or Joseph Campbell). You may have noticed us tossing the term allegory around a lot. It means that the characters and actions in a story have symbolic doubles. Adam Trask, for instance, is both Adam Trask the character in East of Eden and the biblical Adam. So when he's innocent and obsessed with creating a perfect Eden to live in with Eve (Cathy), we have an Oh-I-see-what-you-did-there-Steinbeck moment. It gives his actions a new significance once we realize that he isn't just someone who wants to live on a nice ranch with his wife. Apply this to the whole story, and presto: you've got yourself a twentieth-century Genesis.

ANALYSIS: WRITING STYLE Straightforward What do we mean by straightforward? We mean that Steinbeck doesn't beat around the bush. Subtlety is not his game, especially when it comes to characterization. Steinbeck doesn't show you how a character is feeling by telling you about their body language or facial expression or actions: he just straight up tells you. Look at this: Charles had one great quality. He was never sorry—ever. (3.3.5) Okay, so Charles = never sorry. Got it. Now we know something about Charles. Or check out this passage about the tension in Kate's whorehouse: Kate knew how the girls felt about her. They were desperately afraid of her. She kept them that way. It was probable that they hated her, and that didn't matter either. But they trusted her, and that did matter. (40.3.4) This passage is a little different from the first in that it doesn't directly tell us something about Kate's personality, but it does tell us something about Kate through the way she runs her house: that she is powerful and scary. And the language

Steinbeck uses to tell us is super blunt: "They were desperately afraid of her." You don't get much more straightforward than that. So why write this way? Since the story spans a period of about fifty years, Steinbeck can cover a lot of ground by giving us these kinds of summarizing descriptions. And they pack a punch too. "He was never sorry—ever" is at once telling us something very simple but also really unnerving. What kind of person is never ever sorry? What does this mean about how Charles is going to behave in the future? Those five words give us a lot to think about.

ANALYSIS: PLOT ANALYSIS Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients: the initial situation, conflict, complication, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion. Great writers sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice. Exposition Meet the Trasks, Part I In order for us to get the whole Adam-Eve/Cain-Abel allegory, we need to set the stage, introduce the players, and show what kind of baggage they're carrying. For that, we've got the first generation of Trasks. Things seem to be going moderately well, aside from a few road bumps here and there, until Cathy shoots Adam and blows the whole illusion of Eden to smithereens.

Rising Action Trouble in Paradise, Literally Now it's up to Adam, Lee, and Samuel to make sure that the next generation of Trasks don't inherit the issues of their parents. The only problem is that it seems inevitable that they will. Cal is essentially a clone of Charles and Aron is making all the same mistakes that Adam did. What's worse, Cathy/Kate has gained quite the reputation for herself in Salinas, and it's only a matter of time before the boys find out. Talk about trouble brewing.

Climax That Awkward Moment Where You Find Out the Truth

It all comes to a head when Cal gives his father the money he earned and is rebuked. That one act sets into motion all the tragedies of the novel: Cal showing Aron Kate, Aron joining the army, Adam having a stroke, and Kate's suicide. All over some beans (no, really).

Falling Action Learning to Love Yourself While Also Being Wracked with Guilt We have some things happen in the interim before the novel's final blow, like Cal and Abra developing a relationship, and Lee giving Cal some tough love advice about getting over himself. It gives us a sense that even though some really bad stuff may have happened, it isn't completely hopeless.

Resolution Father Forgives, Kind of After Aron's death and Adam's severe stroke, we need to know that this story isn't just going to repeat itself in all subsequent Trask generations. So it's definitely a break-the-cycle moment at the end when Adam gives his blessing and essentially tells Cal that he has the choice to be whatever kind of person he wants to be....