Actor Richard Davalos

East of Eden is a novel by American author and Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. The Hamilton family in the novel is said to be based on the real-life family of Samuel Hamilton, Steinbeck’s maternal grandfather.

23-year-old

the American Civil War

Cathy’s suicide was her finally surrendering. She accepted that she was afraid and that “they had something she was missing”-love. His goodness leads him to commit suicide. Additionally, did Cathy kill her parents in East of Eden?

She signs over all her possessions to Aron, not Cal. She then commits suicide by taking a lethal dose of morphine.

Since Olive was made of sterner stuff, Dessie was the sweet Hamilton girl. Sadly, she died of appendicitis while staying out in the country alone with Tom, a tragedy for which he blamed himself unto suicide.

Cyrus’s evil afflicts Charles, and Charles’s evil afflicts Cathy. Aron fears that Cathy’s evil makes him inherently evil, and this fear is what shatters him. When Cathy leaves her entire fortune to Aron upon her death, an enormous symbolic burden is placed on his shoulders.

Ames’s house

When Cal takes Aron to Cathy’s brothel, he at least temporary loses his struggle with evil. In doing so, Cal fulfills his role in the Cain-Abel story, causing Aron to join the army and ship off to die in the war.

Charles’s scar corresponds to the “mark of Cain” in the biblical story of Cain and Abel. After God discovers Cain’s murder of Abel, he banishes Cain to the lands east of Eden and puts a mark on Cain so that no one who encounters him will kill him. In this regard, the mark is not a curse but a form of protection.