Eric Burdon, an influential songwriter involved in the band “The Animals” once proclaimed: “‘Inside each of us, there is the seed of both good and evil: It's a constant struggle as to which one will win, and one cannot exist without the other”’ (Burdon). Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck, in one of his most ambitious novels, East of Eden, explores this concept through the lives and decisions of regular people in a poor town setting during the 20th century. While many of Steinbeck’s characters fit the criteria of purely evil or purely good, one character that is neither purely good nor purely evil plays a pivotal role. Caleb Trask, the son of Adam Trask, is morally ambiguous through his possession of both good and evil, and because of his moral …show more content…
The rest of the characters in the novel largely fall into two simple categories: good, and evil. For example, the character Cathy is “[a] monster born in the world to human parents”, making her essentially a character who has no choice, because of the fact that she was “born with the tendencies” (Steinbeck pg. 72). From the beginning of the novel to the end, Cathy remains unshakably evil, even to her death. All the other characters that possess evil, besides Caleb, follow this rigid caste, never gaining the opportunity to decide between good and evil. Juxtaposed against Cathy is the character Samuel Hamilton. Samuel Hamilton is always considered to be “a fine man” (Steinbeck pg. 138) by the townspeople, because he is a character that remains unshakably good. As the evil characters remain evil throughout the novel, like Cathy, the good characters remain good, like Samuel Hamilton. Caleb is not like these characters whatsoever. Using Caleb’s ambiguous personality, Steinbeck employs the device of contrast to emphasize the specific trait that Caleb possesses that the others do not: the ability to choose between good and evil. This serves to provide evidence to support the main theme of the work: the application of choice. Choice is what gives Steinbeck’s novel its flavor and impressiveness. Without the character of Caleb Trask, and the details of Caleb’s moral struggles and frequent decisions, the concept of choice would be much less emphasized throughout the novel. Therefore, Caleb’s moral ambiguity is extremely significant to the work as a whole, because it supports the novel’s theme: timshel, or the ability of all people to choose their life’s