Fragments of a Man: The Fracturing of Time and Mind in John Steinbeck's East of Eden

Abstract

John Steinbeck (1902-1968) is one of America’s most highly regarded authors, widely recognized for his Dust Bowl Trilogy, constituted by the novels, In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The Grapes of Wrath, in particular, brought Steinbeck fame and fortune, and was largely the reason why he was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature. Grapes of Wrath also brought Steinbeck harsh criticism, threats, and anguish that forced him to move from California to the East Coast. Using a neo-historicist approach that takes into account biographical, cultural, and historical contexts, this thesis attempts to contribute to the ideas that the realism and social concerns of the Dust Bowl Trilogy are uncharacteristic of Steinbeck’s writing; that the attribution of Grapes of Wrath to Steinbeck alone is problematic; and that the writing of East of Eden (1952), which Steinbeck considered his best novel, was part of efforts to sanitize his reputation, erase his past, and bury a number of troubling secrets. A postmodern, rather than a realist, Steinbeck did not favor historical or social realism and felt much more at home writing pseudo-historical and revisionist fantasies only loosely connected to historical and other realities. East of Eden, which Steinbeck also called “the only book I have ever written,” is his most notable effort to distance himself from Grapes of Wrath. Written in the midst of the anti-communist hysterias of the late 1940s and 1950s, East of Eden is Steinbeck’s plea to be considered a patriotic American in no way associated with communism. It is also Steinbeck’s attempt to unburden himself of guilts apparently connected to the biblical stories of Cain and Abel, and Jacob and Esau. To those effects, the novel engages in a wholesale demolition and reconstruction of time, history, and the author’s psyche and identity.