East of Eden

Chapter 10

John Steinbeck · Mountaineers 10th–12th

Teaching Companion Print Adapt for your student

Copywork

Charles buttered a slice of bread, gouged out a knifeful of jam, and spread it over the butter. He dug butter for his second slice and left a slop of jam on the butter roll.

Charles placed seven eggs on top of the warming oven and built his fire carefully of small pieces of kindling until it burned fiercely. He put the skillet down next to the flame. His sullenness left him as he fried the bacon.

Read both passages aloud. In the first, the jam on the butter roll is “a slop.” In the second, Charles’s bad mood leaves him as he cooks. Whose eyes are we looking through in each one?

For the educator Two short passages from the chapter’s two breakfasts. The quarrels over butter and matches are not filler here; they are the shape of the brothers’ life together, and these passages let the student copy that shape. The first, two sentences long, comes just before Adam shouts about the butter and Charles tells him to get off the place. Its first sentence runs three verbs in a row, “buttered,” “gouged out” and “spread,” and the middle one is rough; the second adds “dug” and the blunt noun “slop.” The verbs do the judging, and the reader sees the mess Adam sees. The second passage, three sentences long, comes in the second part, in the middle of Adam’s talk of California. A long sentence of careful work (“built his fire carefully of small pieces of kindling until it burned fiercely”) is followed by a short one, and then by a feeling that acts like a person: “His sullenness left him as he fried the bacon.” Students copying them practise a series of verbs, a long sentence answered by a short one, and a sentence whose subject is a mood. For the talk prompt, listen for answers that hear Adam in the first passage: “gouged out” and “slop” are a watcher’s words, and his shout about the butter comes next. In the second, the narrator goes inside Charles to name a mood just as it leaves, while Adam stands by the stove. Some students will say the narrator stands apart in both and judges each brother in turn; let them argue it from the verbs. A student may notice that Adam asks for four eggs and Charles sets out seven, or that the second breakfast still ends in shouting, and ask how long the calm lasts. Let the student argue from the page.

Discussion

Narration Tell the chapter back in its three parts, from the opening line about two men living together to Adam’s promise to tell about the road gang.

Twice in this chapter, years apart, Adam questions why they work so hard. Both times Charles gives the same answer: “You can’t lay in bed and run a farm.” What is that line protecting? Character
Adam’s gentlest memory of the army ends with bodies piled like logs, brush on top, coal oil poured on. A moment later he adds, “You’re burning that bacon.” Why does he turn to the bacon just then? Inference
Charles says of the schoolteacher, “Girl that pretty’s got no right in a little town. Just makes people uneasy.” Whose uneasiness does he mean? Theme
Charles asks Adam to go away next time without a fight. Yet when Adam offers to build a little house by the woodlot, Charles swears he’ll burn it down. Why is that house worse to him than his brother leaving? Character

Make a Connection Think of a time when someone close to you owed you something, or you owed them. What made it hard or easy to bring up?

Vocabulary

knifeful: Charles buttered a slice of bread, gouged out a knifeful of jam, and spread it over the butter. As much as a knife blade will carry; built like spoonful and handful, where -ful means the amount a thing holds. Steinbeck could have said only that Charles took some jam. The measure word, with “gouged out,” makes the amount too big and the act careless, and the jam left on the butter is what Adam cannot let pass.
sullenness: His sullenness left him as he fried the bacon. A silent, sulky bad mood that shows in the face and manner more than in words; the noun of sullen. The narrator gives Charles’s mood a verb, as if it could walk out of the room: it “left him” while his hands were busy. The brothers rarely name a feeling aloud, and here the narrator names one only as it goes.
hoity toity: Too hoity toity. Acting as if one is better than other people; stuck-up (an old, mocking, rhyming phrase). Charles repeats it as the town’s charge against the schoolteacher, right after a rumour about her silk underwear. It is gossip’s word, not a fact he knows: he never got to know her.

Critical thinking

Adam robbed a store for clothes and sent the money back “with ten per cent interest.” He never paid back the hundred dollars his brother sent him. How can one man be so careful with one debt and so careless with the other?
Charles laughs and says it makes him proud that his brother was a jailbird. Is he glad to know Adam better, or glad to see Adam brought down?