East of Eden

Chapter 42

John Steinbeck · Mountaineers 10th–12th

Teaching Companion Print Adapt for your student

Copywork

And the gangling, shuffling loose-jointed boys carrying suitcases were marching awkwardly down Main Street to the Southern Pacific Depot. They were sheepish, and the Salinas Band marched ahead of them, playing the “Stars and Stripes Forever,” and the families walking along beside them were crying, and the music sounded like a dirge. The draftees wouldn’t look at their mothers. They didn’t dare. We’d never thought the war could happen to us.

Read the passage aloud. The band plays a march, but to the narrator it sounds like a dirge, a song for the dead. What in the second sentence turns the march into a dirge?

For the educator The passage is the whole sixth paragraph, between the names of the dead and the talk in the poolrooms. It is the one scene the narrator watches in the street, and it holds the moment the war leaves Salinas. The five sentences move from a long look at the boys, to a three-word silence, to the town. The first opens on “And,” as if the narrator were still speaking from the paragraph before. It sets three words for awkward young bodies in front of “boys,” “gangling, shuffling loose-jointed,” with no comma before the last, and gives the boys suitcases, not rifles; “marching awkwardly” undoes the march with its own adverb. The second joins four clauses with “and”: the boys, the band, the families, the music. It walks without stopping and ends on “dirge,” a song for the dead. It also sets a song title in quotation marks, with the comma inside them. The third and fourth are short, and the fourth is three words: “They didn’t dare.” The fifth turns from “they” to “we” and takes back the chapter’s first sentence, “A war comes always to someone else.” The vocabulary words gangling and loose-jointed are both in the first sentence. For the talk prompt, many will point to the chain of “and”s, which keeps the sentence moving at the pace of a slow procession; some will point to the families walking “along beside them” and crying; some will say nothing in the music changed, and that the “sheepish” boys and the crying around the band turn a march into a dirge; a few will notice the title itself, “Forever,” played for boys bound for a war. Let the students hear the long sentence and the short ones against each other, and leave the verdict to them.

Discussion

Narration Tell the chapter back, from “A war comes always to someone else” to the little boy punched in the nose. Then say where you hear the narrator’s voice change most.

Troop C comes home from Mexico and says the Mexicans can shoot. Later the poolroom men say a soldier told them the Germans can’t be beaten. Both bring news that the enemy is stronger than the town believed. So why does the narrator call only the poolroom men “carrion talkers”? Character
Marty Hopps gets his name and one word: “dead.” The Berges boy gets where he lived, his good looks, and “our little sister,” who loved him from the time she was three. Which death hits you harder, and what in the sentence does it? Author's choice
On the march to the depot, the draftees won’t look at their mothers. “They didn’t dare.” What were they afraid of? Character
Beans now sell for twelve and a half cents a pound. The farmers wish they hadn’t signed, six months ago, for “a lousy two cents” over the going price. Why does the narrator put a sentence about money in a chapter full of grief? Author's choice
The town’s last song is “a baby’s prayer at twilight.” The narrator breaks it off with a dash. Why not let it finish? Author's choice

Make a Connection Think of a time, in a story or in your own life, when people sang together through something hard. What could the song say that they could not?

Vocabulary

gangling: And the gangling, shuffling loose-jointed boys carrying suitcases were marching awkwardly down Main Street to the Southern Pacific Depot. Tall, thin and awkward, as if the body had grown faster than its owner could learn to manage it; it is said most often of boys in their teens. It probably grows from an old word gang, to go or walk, the same gang that is in gangway. It is the first of three words the narrator sets in front of “boys,” and none of the three is a soldier’s word, in a town that believed every American was “a rifleman by birth.”
loose-jointed: And the gangling, shuffling loose-jointed boys carrying suitcases were marching awkwardly down Main Street to the Southern Pacific Depot. Moving with limbs that swing freely and without control, as if the joints were held together too loosely. It is built from two plain words, loose and jointed, having joints. Where gangling describes how the boys are built, loose-jointed describes how they move, and the sentence gives it no comma after “shuffling,” so the two words run together the way the boys do. They are about to be drilled into soldiers; this is how they walk before that.

Critical thinking

The narrator says “I” only twice in this chapter: “We, I, my family” early on, and “I guess” in the last sentence. Everywhere else he says “we.” What can he say as “I” that he could not say as “we”?
The narrator ends by comparing the town to “a tough but inexperienced little boy who gets punched in the nose.” Does that comparison fit what the war has done to Salinas, or does it make the losses seem too small?