Recently I’ve finished the book East of Eden. I picked it up primarily because I’ve heard such great thing about it. And I won’t lie, as I read it I could see what people meant. The descriptions Steinbeck brought into his pages were so fulfilling and delicate; it was as if I was right there with the characters. The story was amazing, and I think Part 1 of East of Eden was probably the best section of a book I’ve ever read. The characters were so well written and I could relate to almost all of them. The way the stories intertwined and then concluded and then spawned more deeper stories, was honestly remarkable.
However
As I read through the book, I couldn’t help but find myself continuously anticipating the ending. I knew it would be amazing. And currently I’ve been torn on if it actually was. I’ll explain:
>! As I read the last 50 pages of the book, I started to feel as if it was ending too quickly. The ending itself felt rushed to me. All of the in-depth descriptions we grew so used to throughout the book, whether they’re surrounding a location or even a character’s thoughts, are completely missing. Cal’s reaction to his brother dying was barely even described; and it was as if his reaction to his father rejecting his $15,000 was more of a heartbreak to him than his own brother’s demise. Abra doesn’t even seem to bat an eye when she finds out that the boy she had loved for the majority of her childhood has been killed. The only reactions I could understand were Lee’s and Adam’s.
I felt as though Aaron suddenly got bumped out of the story, too. He joins the army and dies within the matter of a handful of pages. The last we ever get of his character is of a brief subtle letter he writes to his father. It felt cheap to me, that this character we had grown to love and empathise with, was met with a death that had such little effort to it.
Perhaps I’m expecting too much for a scenario where a family has been destroyed all in the span of a day. But in a book that had been so far written beautifully and structured incredibly, i could not help but feel as if the last 50 pages could have been done much better if they spanned 100 !<
I’d love to have a discussion about this, what are your thoughts?
by [deleted]
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From what I remember reading Aron’s death is the result of finding out the truth of who his mon is and unis horrified. So he essentially joins the war effort but really it’s a suicide attempt. He doesn’t want to live. So his arc is done by the time he enlists, he’s already dead. And perhaps the characters knew it so the author didn’t stretch out the reaction when the news broke
Aaron seemed to me like a secondary character compared to Cal.He was too perfect and therefore uninteresting. For the book to follow him to Europe and describe his death would seem abrupt.
I liked the book but almost any novel of that length is going to have flaws. I didn’t think at the time that the book ended too quickly. I saw the book as having developed the same themes throughout so it wasn’t really necessary to dwell on the details of either brother’s fate. The efficient ending was one of the things I liked about the book. It would have been even more efficient if Steinbeck had cut out all of that timshel preaching. But I totally respect that you didn’t see it that way. I think this shows how hard it is to be a writer and anticipate what readers will need for a satisfying ending.
I think I had a similar feeling after I first read it, but then I reasoned that messiness of the last 50 pages was almost intentional and fitting. It was almost as if that one reveal to Aron unraveled this family and this whole story. We have a story that’s so tight and structured because a lot of the characters’ ugliest emotions are kept in check, but when Cal lashes out and reveals Kate’s identity he demonstrates how quickly lives can be ruined a single malicious act.
I was also very firmly into the idea that Abra wasn’t truly in love with Aron but had just grown comfortable and that’s why his death doesn’t affect her all that much.
Hey, I also literally just finished the book.
The ending caught me off. I didn’t expect (or maybe want) it to end so soon but then again, I couldn’t imagine how else it would end… I wanted the book to go on and on and on telling me about all the characters.
I don’t know if its because I haven’t read a fiction book in a while but East if Eden felt really different. There wasnt just one protagonist, it went back and forth between the different thread. At the beginning I was just wondering how they would all interlink. It was quite interesting.
What do you make of Abra’s feelings for Cal? That caught me a little off-guard.
When Abra suddenly switched to Cal at the end it really didn’t seem that strange to me. She explained that Aron had always pictured her as a “perfect” person ever since they met as children. She knew she could never live up to the mental image that Aron held of her and it was causing her some stress. She had years to think about this and figure it out. Then when she realized herself to be a woman, she made the rational decision to drop him, at least mentally and emotionally. Their relationship was not unlike the worship that Adam had for Kate (Cathy). He couldn’t see the real person, he could only see and relate to the image he held of her, which was the opposite of her true nature. I guess Aron, being Adam’s son, followed the same line of thinking with Abra, except Abra was a good person, not evil like Kate.
Old thread, I know, but it’s never too late for a classic. I just finished the book as well. I agree with you that the last section seems to be hurried. I have a feeling that there may have been more that got cut at the last minute for length, at least in my head that’s what happened.
I know I’m supposed to hate Kate, and I do, but the person that bothers me the most is Liz Hamilton.
Maybe it’s because I knew many women who still hadn’t evolved past her, even in the 21st century. Staunchly religious, but like Steinbeck said ” “It was well-known that the Lord held most of the same convictions as Mrs. Hamilton” she projected her miserable world view on God, and everyone in her family, despite the bible being the only book she would read, she would literally just imagine something, then convince herself that it was God’s idea, and that she was just a humble servant.
She didnt seem to do anything with love, only anger, rage, and some weird idea of duty, like scrubbing the floors with rage, or baking pies, then withholding pies if she didnt get what she wanted.
Her hypocrisy with alcohol was another thing that bothered me because I’ve seen it my whole life. It’s one thing to abstain for yourself, but everyone tip-toed around on eggshells around her to have a little sip of booze, they’d go to extreme lengths to hide it out in the Forge, and mask their breath by chewing on roots. Her children were raised, but without love it seems, except Tom, and we all know what happened to him.
Then, later on in life, when she couldn’t poop, the doctor told her to try port wine to help things move along. In her closed, stubborn mind it was the Devil’s drink, but she convinced herself if she took it by the spoonful it was medicine, and Steinbeck said she never drew a sober breath after that, and she was up to a quart a day! This made her happy for the first time in her life, but everyone else still suffered because of her ignorance and religiosity all the previous years. But Samuel Hamilton repeated several times that she “was a fine woman” and we just believe that because we want to love the Samuel Hamilton character. I see a monster who no one ever stood up to out of fear, probably traits her mother, and grandmother’s all taught her, or perhaps she developed as a coping mechanism for her own upbringing. Either way, we see a multi-generational lack of any kind of psychological help, what little existed, if any.
It seemed that we just randomly heard about her death as well in the last section of the book, that she “died with a drunk smile on her face” and that was pretty much it. This is why I think more perhaps ended on the cutting room floor if it didnt move the plot along. Anyway, I just had to share these thoughts with someone else who has read the book.
I agree with you that I wish the ending had more space. I would have liked to more development in Cal’s relationship with Abra — like I understand why* it happened, and I was anticipating it even while she was with Aron, but it would’ve been nice to see the characters struggle with it a bit themselves instead of just jumping into it in one conversation.
Same with Aron’s death — I think there was a lot of complexity to unpack, and regardless of how he left, it would have been a very human for all of them to be deeply impacted by the death and spend some time grappling with it.
I feel like the ending was “earned”, but it lost a bit for me by all being truncated into the same night. Like I would have liked the book to end the same way, but for us to get 50 pages of padding from the moment Adam has the stroke and Aron dies, and that final scene to see them all really deal with Aron’s death, and seeing more of a development between Abra and Cal (+ all the complexities of navigating grief/guilt together).
I think it’s a sign of how brilliant this book was and how rich the characters were that we wanted to spend more time with them. But I feel you. So much of the book goes so deep that I wish the ending could have kept up with that.
Aron’s death was reflective of the thousands of young men during WWI whose family perceived it as sudden and unexplained. Newspapers report the battle as a tremendous victory for the generals with little acknowledgment or detail of the individual, common soldier.
Acknowledging that $15,000 at that time is close to $750,000 today, Cal burning the money was truly remarkable.
Just finished this book. I was hoping that Caleb had killed Aron and faked the letter to go the Army to hide it and then further faked another letter that he died in the war. Overall I was glad the Caleb was sorta forgiven by Adam. Thank goodness for Lee! Other than that I enjoyed how deeply we got to know the characters in the book and enjoyed the journey. My 2 cents…🤷♂️