Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

The Biblical story of Cain and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve, provides the narrative framework of Steinbeck's novel. East of Eden demonstrates the perpetual conflict between good and evil in each character. The plot is essentially a recurrence of myth of Cain and Abel. However, in the novel each character seems to resemble one of these two brothers. Charles and Adam, sons of the well-known Cyrus Trask, correspond to Cain and Abel, in the novels first iteration of the biblical story. In the Bible, God sparks Cain’s jealousy by preferring Abel’s sacrifice of a fine lamb to Cain’s sacrifice of grain. This enrages Cain, and he becomes jealous of his older brother. This leads Cain to kill his brother out of enraged anger. In a parallel in East of Eden, Cyrus Trask sparks his younger son Charles’s jealousy by preferring his older sons’ gift of a puppy to Charles’s gift of a knife. After hearing this, the young Charles proceeds to severely beat his brother out of anger. This is the beginning