Chandler Patrick AP Language and Composition- Resnick Period 2 East of EdenAP Novel Form 1.Title:East of Eden 2.Author, Publication Date:John Steinbeck; September 1952 3.Four Main Characters/Description: a.Catherine “Cathy” Trask:Cathy Trask, aka Catherine Ames, aka Kate Albey, is a mysterious woman with, clearly, many aliases. She is described as a petite and delicate blonde that appears beautiful to many. She has small hands and breasts, but her beauty stop with her eyes, which are described to be cold and emotionless. This is her one physical “Achilles heel” that allows her beauty to be permeable to her true, dangerously malevolent nature. Her emotional weakness was her inability to understand people can be good just to be good and can love just because they want to. As the book progresses, her beauty diminishes increasingly. She is a symbolic representation of evil with no good, and as evil is defeated as the book continues on, Cathy is noted as getting crippling arthritis in her hands, gaining weight, and eventually, by the end, becoming ghost-like and dead looking. She represents someone evil, alone, afraid of emotion. b.AdamTrask:Born to Cyrus Trask and his late wife on a farm in Connecticut, Adam represents the goodness without evil and the naivety that comes with it. He could not see the evil in people, whether it be the anger in his father, the entirety of Cathy’s personality, or the violence in his own brother. His love combined with no worldly experience destroys and demoralizes him, especially when Cathy shoots him. He loves his own son, Aron, even when it’s not reciprocated and ignores the love from his other son, Cal. c.Cal Trask:Cal is Adam and Cathy’s son and acts as the second Cain of the novel in the biblical allusion. He is described as having dark, tan skin and dark hair, looking suspiciously like his uncle Charles. Cal quickly develops into what the reader can analyze as lonely, more-mature-than-his-age yet intensely emotionally confused. He prays to not become evil or like his mother. Rather than being naive like his father, Cal is clever, intelligent, and understands the ways of the world and the evil within it. He isn’t necessarily evil, but he does possess meanness and occasional, uncontrollable rage and jealousy, just like Charles and even clear back up to Cyrus. d.AronTrask:Aron is Cal’s brother, Adam and Cathy’s other son and represents the Abel of the story’s biblical allusion. Aron, being loved “from every side” has blue
