By John Steinbeck

Discussion Prompt by Eric Martin

In the 2019 HBO limited series, The Watchmen, based on Alan Moore’s seminal comic book of the same name, the protagonist Angela Abar encounters her 100 year old grandfather who gives her a drug called Nostalgia. The drug contains the person’s harvested memories so he or she can relive them. By taking her grandfather’s Nostalgia pills, Angela experiences what he lived through, including the 1921 Tulsa massacre, his path to becoming a police officer, and his transformation into a masked vigilante known as Hooded Justice. Throughout the rest of the series we see how the experiences of her grandfather, almost 100 years prior, have seemingly shaped Angela’s life without her knowing and we delve deep into the themes of generational trauma and the eternal battle of good versus evil.

In John Steinbeck’s magnum opus, East of Eden, we read a similar multi-generational tale that attempts to tackle the same questions as The Watchmen. Can we ever escape the sins of our fathers? Do the ills that they have wrought upon the world and the traumas they have suffered live in us, hard coded in our DNA? Or, do we have a choice to overcome that which came before us? Can good really overcome evil?

If readers of certain translations of the fourth chapters of Genesis were to stop their Bible study there, it may seem that the answer is a resounding “no”. One chapter after we read the story of man’s original sin in the Garden of Eden, we see man’s depravity once again played out in the person of Cain who murdered his brother in a fit of jealous rage. 

If readers of East of Eden were to stop prior to the last page, pausing before reading Adam Trask’s last words, they may believe that Steinbeck would answer with a “no” as well, with all the wickedness that was on display for 170,000 words prior to the last 7. But the dying man’s last word to his remaining son, “timshel”, shows that perhaps Steinbeck sees that despite man’s depravity, evil can be overcome. 

Thou mayest.

While Steinbeck doesn’t delve deeply into the ways that we may overcome evil, he does paint us a useful portrait of what a good man looks like. And even though these men are fraught with flaws, they are men whose deaths will cause sorrow in the world, which to Steinbeck seems to be the tool by which you measure the worth of a man. So, here’s to good men, in literature and in life.