Good And Evil In John Steinbeck's East Of Eden

The most prominent themes in John Steinbeck’s epic, East of Eden, is good and evil and the concept of free will. He tells the story of two main families, the Hamiltons and their patriarch, Samuel, who are the epitome of good, and the Trasks who juxtapose the Hamiltons’ goodness. Throughout the novel, the stories of the two families come together, and then fade apart as the Trasks take center stage and the Hamiltons begin to fade with the death of their patriarch. But one thing which does not fade is the existence of good and evil, and free will. These two themes weave together and become a presence throughout the whole novel. However, critics such as Joseph Fontenrose critique the “moral confusion” and unclear relation of good to evil the

Steinbeck makes the case that good and evil can be found everywhere, and the two are intertwined in each manifestation. From the very beginning of the novel, Steinbeck makes it clear that good and evil can’t exist without the other. He describes the mountains of the Salinas valley, one which is “full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation” and another that's “dark and brooding-unfriendly and dangerous” (Steinbeck 1). Each good aspect of Salinas has an evil counterpart, even the two main families who come to inhabit it. One cannot exist without the other and the two will continue to exist that way with that balance. By making the first instance of good and evil a description of the terrain, Steinbeck illustrates that the existence of good and evil are constant and embedded in our world. The existence of the mountains reveals that humans need the navigate through good and evil, thus the two are coming together in the lives of humanity. Steinbeck’s narration says that “Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their

It wouldn’t have been conducive to Steinbeck’s point of the novel, timshel, or the doctrine of “Thou mayest”, to have good and evil presented unchangingly no matter what a character attempted to do. Free will alone can cause good and evil to change as navigating them within is central to the struggles characters have with them, so the two will inevitable fluctuate in order to present that struggle. Fontenrose writes that the novel lacks ethical insight and “its author evaluates qualities as well as acts, but they remain abstract” (Fontenrose). However the concepts of good and evil themselves are abstract, which they transmit to those actions, and with the addition of free will, it become harder to pin them down. The idea of free will is that a man “‘for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win’” (Steinbeck 303). Even through the evil of a persons action, free remains and affects the relationship between good and evil greatly, so they cannot be clearly laid out. The “good qualities” of characters like Adam and Aron really aren’t as good as they seem, which Fontenrose critzises, but they are that way to demonstrate how there is no clear definition as a result of ones choices. Neither one is perfect but each can make decisions, from Aron cowering