East of Eden Essay

I. SUBJECT John Steinbeck’s East of Eden centers on the Trask and Hamilton families in the year 1902 in the Salinas Valley, California. After growing up in Connecticut alongside his brother Charles under the harsh parenting and rejection of his father, Adam Trask seeks to find happiness and peace. He vows to be a better man than his father and feels the rolling valleys of California calling him. One night, Cathy Ames crawls onto the doorstep of Adam and Charles’ home after her boyfriend attempted

Fear controls the characters' decisions in both The Handmaid's Tale and East of Eden.  In the Handmaid’s tale Offred is ripped away from her family, and forced to be the surrogate for a very wealthy political family. Throughout the book she is taught to fear men, but if a man were to actually harm her, she would be the one to take the blame. Men are not allowed to speak to her or even see her face. In East of Eden everyone fears one another. The character Adam, fears his brother Charles, and the

parents have in shaping the lives of their children is entirely up for debate. There is no set guide for how you raise your children. As a result, we see a wide range of involvement from smothering to entirely absent. In Steinbeck’s magnum opus East of Eden, the influence of father figures on Adam Trask as well as the resulting effects on Adam’s children is explored. The figures in his life only serve as guiding hands, but the choices he makes are his to make freely. The failures of Adam Trask are

In John Steinbeck’s novel, East of Eden, one sees how past events such as the hostile interactions between brothers, Adam and Charles, effects the attributes of future characters such as Cal. These proceedings mold and form Cal’s character, influencing not only his actions, but also his resonating self-condemnation at the end of the novel. Without these former occurrences, the reader would be otherwise blind to the “curse” of the brothers as seen through the parable of Cain and Abel and to the overriding

East of Eden Summary & Character Descriptions   Because East of Eden is a novel woven together of many people and many stories, it is an especially difficult novel to summarize. It is impossible to draw character sketches without interweaving them with the storyline, thus, I have combined the characters descriptions and plot summary. The book opens by describing the lives of two very different families in very different parts of America. First the Hamiltons, a patriarch built around

In the novel East of Eden, families are a big part of the novel and a major theme. The aspects of the father son relation, especially the conflict caused by a father’s preference for one child over another, is one of the main plots in the story. The Trask family parallels the biblical characters Cain and Abel in many ways. This is an important detail in understanding the meanings behind the novel, as well as the connections the author makes to his own family through the Hamilton family. In the

East of Eden, written by John Steinbeck, is a profound, complicated retelling of the biblical story of Cain and Abel, focused around the overall struggle between good and evil . John Steinbeck wrote this for his own sons, John and Tom, to show them not only the history of their family in the Hamiltons, but also the concept of sibling rivalry emerging from the competition over paternal love and acceptance (Shillinglaw). This was first evident in Adam and Charles Trask, and then in Adam’s sons, Aron

John Steinbeck once wrote, “the word timshel—'Thou mayest'—that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open” (301). As explained in his book East of Eden, Timshel is the idea that one makes conscious choices about their lives rather than taking what they get. Because Adam Trask is rejected by those he trusts most and lets those rejections inhibit him, the comfort of Timshel does not appear to him until late in his life. Though Adam is favored by many

of those before them until they are empowered enough to believe in their own free will. It is this free will and ability to triumph that is known to us as timshel, which is one of the more central ideas about men and sin that the Steinbeck novel East of Eden embodies. It is by far the most conspicuous and pronounced of any of the arguments Steinbeck makes, and this can be attributed to its timeless relevancy. Perhaps every choice made by every individual that has existed since Genesis, as well as every

Religion is a central theme in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Religion constantly appears through the similarities between the Cain and Abel story, the Hebrew word timshel, and the presence of God and Fate in the novel. Throughout the book, the characters struggle with the ideas of good and evil, and choice and freewill. As the story unfolds and progresses, we see the characters deal with these things with religion being the base and the root that the book lays upon. The biblical story of Cain and