East of Eden (1952)

by John Steinbeck

East of Eden tells a meandering story of three generations of fictional Trask men interwoven with a memoir of Steinbeck’s own family in the Salinas valley and bundled together with an informal history of the settling of the American West.

The novel is as resistant to summarization as the Book of Genesis it was based on. If there’s one salient theme that can be put forth as representative of the whole it may be the consistent quality of man’s spirit admist rapidly changing material circumstances.

I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. (pg. 131)

From grandfather Cyrus Trask to his son Adam and his grandsons Caleb and Aron, East of Eden shows three generations of changing domestic lifestyles and innovations in warfare and killing. Cyrus marched against his own countrymen and had his leg sawn off with a lump of lead between his teeth as anesthetic. Adam hunted natives with a rifle and with a virus and stacked bodies into a pyre to illuminate the westward path for homesteader caravans. A printed telegram left on the doorstep told of Aron’s death in a trench dug into a foreign and forgotten land across a continent and an ocean. Between these wars a force drew families off of their farms and into cities. Houses and bread and meat became things you bought instead of built or baked or slaughtered. Greater interconnectivity and reliance upon one another granted the freedom to work not with your hands but with your mind and to live a life where the question was no longer of survival but of fulfillment.

This forward motion along the axis of progress grants the novel a timelessness impossible to achieve if rooted in a single era. Circumstances are ephemeral but change itself is a constant. Rather than writing the story of a snapshot in time Steinbeck writes of five decades of change brought about by a technological revolution. I was born a century too late to experience the Second Industrial Revolution but in time to experience the Digital Revolution firsthand and as such intuitively understand the lived experience of watching the world reshaped around you in an inexorable march that changes nothing in a year and everything in fifty.

It’s tempting to see the fallen nature of our world and to blame it on the things we think we lost along the path to urban domestication: tranquility of mind, the capacity and respect for honest labor, harmony with and responsible stewardship of the natural environment, absolute belief in our own capability derived from absolute belief in the power of God (pg. 12). By plainly illustrating the recurrence of a story—Cain and Abel, the desire of a boy for his father’s love and the depths of depravity he sinks to when it is withheld from him—written of the first generation born with sin, Steinbeck rejects the notion that an inability to adapt to a changing world is responsible for the monstrous nature that lives within each of us.

Most of the insight from this novel comes from either the author himself speaking plainly as narrator or from two sages written in as characters. The first such character is Samuel Hamilton: Irish immigrant, inventor and blacksmith, student of the human condition, father of nine, and Steinbeck’s grandfather. Perhaps as an intentional demonstration of the void that can be left by the passing of a great man, the wind was let out of East of Eden’s sails for a good many chapters after his death. The second sage is known only as Lee: Chinese servant who uses the extra headspace left over due to the limited cognitive demands placed on him as a perpetual outsider to mull over the finer points of life and family and manhood.

The focal point of this story is a thread of discussion between Lee and Samuel and Adam on the word choice in the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4. Through dedicated study of the original Hebrew word timshel, the men determine that God neither grants us the destiny of prevailing over sin (as translated in the King James Version) nor saddles us with the burden of requiring us to (as translated in the American Standard Version) but instead gives us the ability to. Spoken by Samuel in his final conversation with Lee:

“ ‘Thou mayest rule over sin,’ Lee. That’s it. I do not believe all men are destroyed. I can name you a dozen who were not, and they are the ones the world lives by. It is true of the spirit as it is true of battles—only the winners are remembered. Surely most men are destroyed, but there are others who like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkness.” (pg. 308-309)

In conclusion, through a series of parables East of Eden lays out principles that may or may not resonate with you. From Lee:

“And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And I here make a rule—a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting—only the deeply personal and familiar.” (pg. 270)

John Steinbeck poured a lifetime of contemplation into these pages. Any reader (n=1) should be able to find a little bit of himself in there.