I felt this book was part fiction, part essay. The characters were extremely well-developed; even minor characters were developed through at least several paragraphs of background information. No one felt flat to me.
I enjoyed the story very much, but what I loved about the book is that it wasn’t just a story. It was deep thought—years of contemplation—written into a story, and as a result, it leaves the reader with the opportunity to contemplate some of the same themes just as deeply.
In Chapter 34, Steinbeck wrote: “Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence.” But I think East of Eden went further than that. It gave us the opportunity to delve deep into our own psyches and see why we choose good when we do, and why we choose not-so-good when we make that choice.
“Faced with two sets of morals, you’ll follow your training. What you call thinking won’t change it.” In other words, we are more like robots to our conditioning than we realize. We are driven by our subconscious minds, and unless we look—really look at why we make the choices we do—we will keep right on making the same kinds of choices, for better or worse.
“The emotion of nonviolence was building up in him until it became a prejudice like any other thought-stultifying prejudice.”
“It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.”
“We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way.”
All these lines point to not being aware of ourselves. But what if we can learn about ourselves through Steinbeck’s characters?
Steinbeck’s characters were driven by a desire to be happy—or to be loved, which they thought would make them happy. And yet very few, except for possibly Sam Hamilton and eventually Lee, ever looked to discover the difference between true happiness and imagined happiness. When we chase imagined happiness, we make mistaken choices. Conversely, we can’t chase true happiness, because it’s what’s right here, right now, with things exactly as they are.
“You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.”
Clearly, Stenbeck put forth the hypothesis that we can choose between the good and the not-so-good nature within us, and likely everyone who reads East of Eden sees that theme. But what if there was also a deeper theme? Before we can choose, we must look at the imagined ideas we have about happiness—the ideas that drive us subconsciously—and question them.
