This post contains spoilers for Netflix’s East of Eden.
I haven’t read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and I also haven’t watched the earlier film adaptation starring James Dean. I went into Netflix’s East of Eden with no expectations beyond what this adaptation presented.
Despite being published in 1952, the questions Steinbeck raises feel modern.
At its core, East of Eden explores questions we’re still wrestling with today: generational trauma, family dysfunction, the impact of childhood experiences, and what happens when people who have been hurt go on to hurt others.
The story follows Adam and Charles Trask, half-brothers whose relationship echoes the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Jealousy, favoritism, resentment, and violence shape their relationship and continue to affect the generations that come after them. Their stories eventually intertwine with Cathy, one of the most fascinating and unsettling characters I’ve encountered in recent fiction, and later with Adam’s sons, Cal and Aron.
The Netflix adaptation is led by Florence Pugh as Cathy Ames, Christopher Abbott as Adam Trask, Mike Faist as Charles Trask, and Hoon Lee as Lee, with supporting performances from Tracy Letts, Martha Plimpton, and Ciarán Hinds. I loved Pugh’s portrayal of Cathy, a character who became central to many of the questions the series left me wrestling with.
What struck me most wasn’t simply the Cain and Abel parallels.
It was the idea that the same wounds keep appearing from one generation to the next.
The question becomes: are we doomed to repeat what came before us, or do we have the power to choose differently?
Cathy and the Complexity of Empathy
The Netflix adaptation makes an interesting choice in how it presents Cathy.
Rather than introducing her simply as a villain, it invites viewers to consider the trauma she experienced as a child. We see a young girl who wasn’t protected, wasn’t believed, and learned very early that the world could be dangerous.
The adaptation even connects this experience to her fascination with Alice in Wonderland, particularly the desire to become smaller and smaller until she can disappear altogether.
I found this portrayal deeply sad.
It doesn’t make Cathy a good person.
It doesn’t excuse all the harm she causes.
Her choices remain her own.
Yet the series asks viewers to sit with an uncomfortable reality: understanding someone’s pain is not the same thing as excusing their behavior.
One thing I found particularly interesting after finishing the series was learning how dramatically Netflix appears to have changed Cathy’s backstory.
From what I’ve read in summaries and discussions of the novel, Steinbeck presents Cathy very differently. Rather than portraying her as a child who experienced sexual violence, many readers point to an incident involving a ten-year-old Cathy and a false accusation against two boys. Steinbeck also reportedly introduces her as someone who lacks the empathy and moral instincts that most people possess.
Netflix takes a different approach.
Instead of treating Cathy as someone born evil, the adaptation presents her as someone shaped by trauma. In the series, she is sexually assaulted as a child and forced to navigate a world that repeatedly exploits her.
Since I haven’t read the novel yet, I can’t fully compare the two versions for myself. But from what I’ve learned, the adaptation seems less interested in asking whether evil is inherited and more interested in asking how trauma shapes people.
I find that shift fascinating.
Not because it excuses Cathy.
It doesn’t.
The terrible things she does remain her responsibility.
But by changing her childhood, Netflix transforms Cathy from a symbol of inherent evil into a deeply damaged human being making destructive choices.
That distinction matters.
The adaptation doesn’t ask me to forgive Cathy.
It asks me to understand her.
And those are not the same thing.
In many ways, that change reinforces the central question that stayed with me throughout the series: What happens when hurt people hurt people?
Can we recognize someone’s suffering without excusing the suffering they cause?
Can empathy and accountability exist at the same time?
I think they can.
And I think that’s one reason this adaptation resonated with me so strongly.
For me, one of the most difficult questions raised by the story is where responsibility begins and ends.
If someone is harmed by others, how much responsibility do those people bear for what follows?
If someone makes choices that hurt others, how much responsibility belongs to them?
The story doesn’t provide easy answers.
Instead, it leaves viewers wrestling with difficult questions about trauma, agency, and accountability.
The Question My Teacher Asked Me
Watching East of Eden unexpectedly brought me back to a paper I wrote in high school.
My class was reading Of Mice and Men, and we were assigned a question that has followed generations of readers:
Was George right to kill Lennie?
At the time, my answer felt simple.
Lennie had killed someone.
Therefore, George did the right thing.
I viewed the world in fairly black-and-white terms. At the time, I believed people had to be taught kindness and selflessness. We teach children not to hit, not to kick, not to take what isn’t theirs. We teach them to share, to consider the needs of others, and to think beyond themselves.
In my teenage mind, babies are born selfish. Selflessness is something we learn. Kindness is something we practice. Morality is something we are taught.
So when I looked at Lennie, I wasn’t thinking about empathy. I was thinking about responsibility. He had done something terrible, and that fact overshadowed everything else.
Looking back, I can see that I was viewing the situation through a very rigid lens.
Then my teacher returned my paper, and in the margins he had written a question I’ve never forgotten:
“Where is your empathy?”
At the time, I didn’t fully understand what he meant.
Now I think I do.
Interestingly, I still believe George made the right choice.
What has changed is my understanding of the question.
Lennie wasn’t evil.
He didn’t understand his own strength.
He loved people.
He cared for George.
He wanted friendship, safety, and belonging.
And yet, he killed someone.
His good intentions didn’t erase the consequences of what happened.
But the consequences didn’t erase his humanity either.
As a teenager, I focused almost entirely on responsibility.
As an adult, I’ve come to understand that empathy and accountability can exist at the same time.
What East of Eden Made Me Realize
That’s why Cathy fascinated me so much.
Understanding the trauma she experienced doesn’t excuse what she does.
But neither does the harm she causes erase the reality of her suffering.
The same applies to Cal.
His greatest fear isn’t that he’s done something wrong.
His greatest fear is that he is something wrong.
He worries that because he comes from Cathy, he is destined to become her.
That there is something broken in him that can never be fixed.
What both Of Mice and Men and East of Eden challenged me to realize is that people are rarely as simple as we want them to be.
When I was younger, I wanted clear categories. Good people and bad people. Heroes and villains. Innocent people and guilty people.
But the older I get, the more I realize that most people don’t fit neatly into those boxes.
East of Eden repeatedly reminds us that there is good and bad in everyone. No one is completely pure. No one is completely without flaws. Even the characters who seem kind and virtuous have moments of weakness, selfishness, and failure. Likewise, the characters who cause harm are not always without humanity, pain, or vulnerability.
Cathy may be one of the most destructive characters in the story, yet we are shown the wounds that shaped her. Cal fears that darkness exists within him, yet he is also capable of compassion, love, and sacrifice. Adam wants to be a good father, yet he often fails the people who need him most.
That’s what makes the story feel so human.
It refuses to divide people into saints and monsters.
Instead, it suggests that all of us carry the capacity for both good and evil. The question is not whether darkness exists within us. The question is what we choose to do with it.
And that’s where one of the story’s most famous ideas comes in:
Timshel.
“Thou mayest.”
You may choose.
You may choose differently than your parents.
You may choose differently than your past.
You may choose differently than what has been handed down to you.
The older I get, the less interested I am in sorting people into categories of good and bad.
Life simply isn’t that simple.
People can be victims and perpetrators.
They can be loving and destructive.
They can be wounded and responsible.
They can deserve accountability while still deserving our empathy.
Maybe that’s why East of Eden affected me so much.
What began as a story about brothers became a story about choice.
A story about whether trauma becomes destiny.
A story about whether the worst thing that happened to us, or the worst thing we’ve done, defines who we are forever.
And perhaps that’s the same lesson my teacher was trying to teach me all those years ago.
Empathy is not the opposite of accountability.
Accountability is not the absence of empathy.
The challenge is learning how to hold both truths at the same time.
Because if there is both good and bad in all of us, then none of us are simply the worst thing we’ve done, nor are we only the best parts of ourselves.
We are the choices we make.
And that, ultimately, is what timshel means to me.
Thou mayest.
Not that trauma isn’t real.
Not that our childhoods don’t shape us.
Not that the choices of others don’t affect the course of our lives.
But that what happened to us is not the entire story.
We still have a choice in what comes next.
Maybe that’s why this story has stayed with me.
I started East of Eden expecting a story about two brothers.
Instead, I found myself thinking about empathy, accountability, generational trauma, and a question my high school teacher wrote in the margins of a paper years ago.
“Where is your empathy?”
I think East of Eden answers that question by reminding us that understanding someone is not the same thing as excusing them.
Empathy does not erase consequences.
Accountability does not erase humanity.
And perhaps wisdom is learning how to hold both truths at once.
Perhaps maturity isn’t learning that people are good or bad. Perhaps it’s learning that people are almost always both.
There is light and darkness in all of us.
The question is not which one exists.
The question is which one we choose to nurture.
Timshel.
Thou mayest.
You may choose.
And maybe that’s the most hopeful part of all.
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