East of Eden

Chapter 6

John Steinbeck · Mountaineers 10th–12th

Teaching Companion Print Adapt for your student

Copywork

He worked the farm mightily because he was lonely. Coming in from his work, he gorged himself on fried food and went to bed and to sleep in the resulting torpor.

Cyrus had become a great man. He dressed like a great man—black broadcloth coat and trousers, wide black hat, overcoat with a velvet collar, ebony cane which he made to seem a sword. And Cyrus conducted himself like a great man. His speech was slow and mellow, measured and unexcited, his gestures were wide, and new teeth gave him a vulpine smile out of all proportion to his emotion.

Read both passages aloud. Charles gets a plain reason: he works “because he was lonely.” Cyrus gets “a great man” three times. By the third time, do you believe it more or less?

For the educator Two passages, six sentences, a son and his father. The first passage is two sentences from the paragraph on Charles’s restlessness. Its first sentence gives the hard work and its cause in plain words, and saves the reason, “because he was lonely,” for the end. Its second opens on a phrase, “Coming in from his work,” then runs two verbs, gorged and went, the second stretched over “to bed and to sleep,” before it lands on “the resulting torpor.” The word “resulting” makes the dullness the product of the day, as if loneliness, work and food added up to it. The second passage is four sentences from Adam’s first sight of Cyrus in Washington. Three of them turn on the same words, “a great man”: the first and third end on them, and the second reaches them just before its dash. The verbs shift as they go: Cyrus “had become” a great man, then “dressed like” one, then “conducted himself like” one, so that by the third the greatness is a matter of clothes and manner. The second sentence uses a dash to open a list of clothing that ends on a cane “which he made to seem a sword.” The fourth pairs its describing words, “slow and mellow, measured and unexcited,” and ends on “a vulpine smile out of all proportion to his emotion.” Students copying them practise a reason saved for the end of a sentence, a sentence that opens on a phrase before its subject, a dash that opens a list, and one phrase repeated across sentences. For the talk prompt, listen for a student who hears “like a great man” as costume, so that each repeat believes Cyrus a little less, and for one who hears the narrator piling up proof in clothes, voice and bearing until the greatness is real to everyone but Adam. Listen too for one who sets Charles’s plain “because he was lonely” beside the show: a man with no one to see him beside a man who is always being seen.

Discussion

Narration Tell the chapter back, from Charles alone on the farm to the last line, where he spends “all of his energy on the farm.”

The narrator says Charles remembers the years before Adam left “quite inaccurately” as the happy time. If the memory is wrong, what is he really missing? Character
The bartender’s birthmark grows every year, and he goes by Cat. Charles’s scar grows darker, and he combs his hair down over it. Why can one man wear his mark easily while the other hides his? Inference
Late at night the bartender wants to close up. He jokes that the one trick he lacks is how to get Adam to go home. “Adam stared at him, stared at him and did not speak.” What did that joke hit in Adam? Character
Adam starts to feel contempt for the grand man with the cane. Then, in the hotel, Cyrus takes off his false leg, and the old fear comes back. Why would the man with his leg off frighten Adam more? Inference
Charles sleeps in the shed to keep the scrubbed house clean for Adam. He cooks on the forge out there and wonders why he “never thought of it before.” What does the shed give him that the house never did? Character

Make a Connection Many people long for a homecoming and dread it at the same time. Think of one, in your own life or in a story you know. What made going back harder than staying away?

Vocabulary

torpor: Coming in from his work, he gorged himself on fried food and went to bed and to sleep in the resulting torpor. A heavy, sluggish dullness of body and mind, like an animal half asleep in winter. Charles works until he is spent and eats until he is dull, and torpor is how each lonely day ends.
stupefied: Their roar stupefied and hypnotized him. Stunned into dullness, so that a person cannot think clearly (from the Latin stupere, to be stunned). The falls hold Adam by the hour, and the word fits a man who already feels that he is sleepwalking.
inhospitality: The porch steps complained again, and Adam knew the woman would be standing in her doorway ready to spray inhospitality on the new arrival. An unwelcoming way of treating a guest or stranger; the opposite of hospitality. The narrator makes it something the landlady sprays, like a cold mist, at each new arrival, and it greets Adam on the night he knows he cannot go home.
vulpine: His speech was slow and mellow, measured and unexcited, his gestures were wide, and new teeth gave him a vulpine smile out of all proportion to his emotion. Like a fox (from the Latin vulpes, fox): sharp, sly, a little hungry. Cyrus’s new teeth make his smile bigger than his feeling, and the fox in the word hints at the act Adam soon sees through.
obsequious: And the speed with which doors opened straight to the Colonel, the obsequious respect of that officer, the words, “The Secretary will see you now, sir,” did not remove Adam’s feeling. Too eager to please or obey; fawning. Colonel Wells shows Cyrus that kind of respect, and the show does not ease Adam’s sense that something is false.

Critical thinking

Adam goes back to his regiment and rots in barracks, just as his father said he would. There he remembers “that Cyrus was lonely and alone—and knew it.” Who knew it?
Adam was free to go home and chose the army he hated instead. Was that weakness, or did he understand something about the farm that Charles did not?