I finally finished East of Eden, and wow, what a read. I find that Steinbeck has a way with words that you rarely find in some literature these days. I enjoyed the themes in this novel, and I found the "retelling" of the story of Cain and Abel done in a very interesting way.
So for my final post on our second book I decided to talk about some themes and share a few thoughts in the process:
There’s an all-encompassing theme about the existence of people from various walks of life, and in the end what validates their existence is basically tied to how well they are remembered by those who left them behind.
Although there seems to be no real romantic love, there is a love of marital commitment between Samuel Hamilton and his wife Liza. There are a lot of people who love out of convenience, domination, and selfish desires, but we find no real love until the very end of the book. The love at the end is very different and one might say accidental, an undeserving love that falls on two of the characters. It’s in this humble form that these two characters manage to find the only genuinely felt love through the entire novel.
One of the strongest themes in the book is the desire to be loved by another, and what happens when love is withheld. Aaron and Cal are juxtaposed in the story. Aaron does very little to earn his father’s love and Cal works very hard to win Adam’s approval. Adam only seems to focus on giving love and approval to Aaron, further adding to Cal’s insecurities about his father’s love for him. This becomes the great struggle toward the end of the book, Cal desperately looking for love and approval from his father drives the book to a woeful conclusion.
Not only does this reflect our human experience of seeking love, but I think it also reflects the feeling that many sons (and daughters) may have toward their fathers. Ultimately it comes down to the realization that we need to reconcile with one another and given love if we are to be fully human.
No comments:
Post a Comment