East of Eden

My summer book, East of Eden, is so unbelievably complex and intricate that it's sometimes difficult to pull out individual strands of happiness from the pages. There are so many characters pulling the reader in so many ways that it's tough to understand their actions, let alone their emotions. But I think that's what John Steinbeck was striving to do. I think if he was thinking about inserting happiness into his novel, he wanted to do so that it blurred the lines of happiness and sorrow, joy and anger, and his ultimate debate of good and evil. The point is that is the characters experience happiness in so many variations as they live out their lives in the Salinas Valley.

Take Samuel Hamilton, a character I perceive to be extremely good and moral. His greatest joy and his happiness comes from his children, his wife, and his podunk farm that rarely supplies enough food for his family of 11. Happiness exists on the Hamilton farm when one daughter is married, or a son starts his own business, or when there is a good harvest. Sam chooses to see happiness and optimism in his harsh valley of life.

But then, there's Kate. Kate; a character so cynical and so evil that I truly don't believe she could exist in our reality. Everything about her is wicked and ill-intended. But ironically enough, I think that she almost finds happiness more than any other character. To Kate, happiness is manipulation and deception and murder. Through her evil actions, she ultimately ends up pleasing herself, whether she acknowledges it or not. Her happiness is twisted and immoral in most of our eyes, but who are we to judge someone else's happiness?

Between Samuel and Kate, there are multiple characters who greet happiness along with the ebb and flow of their life. Adam, the father of Cal and Aron, finds happiness in, unfortunately, Kate. Lee, Adam's housekeeper, finds it in his studies of the translations of the Bible, and by giving Adam and his family advice. Liz, Sam's wife, finds it in ordering others around and maintaining a household of such order that it would put any accountant to shame.

The point is that happiness, as I mentioned in my first post, is impossible to place one definition on. Every being experiences it in different ways at different moments in their lives. In East of Eden, the tangled web of lives led throughout the multi-generation story provides examples of just that. Life is in fact all those things, evil, good, anger, joy, sorrow, and happiness. I think it's all of them, going on at the same time.