What happens in Part Two, Chapter 16 of East of Eden?
Samuel Hamilton rides home under moonlight after visiting Adam Trask's ranch, feeling a sourceless sadness he calls "Welshrats." He traces the feeling to Cathy, Adam's wife, whose eyes carry no human message. A childhood memory surfaces: as a small boy in Londonderry, he and his father were swept by a crowd to a public hanging. The hanged golden-haired man had depthless, inhuman eyes like a goat's. Samuel's father held his head down and later told him they had killed "a bad man" who did "dreadful things." Samuel connects Cathy's eyes to the golden man's, then resolves to dismiss the thought and help with Adam's Eden as a guilt-payment.
The next morning, Liza Hamilton cooks breakfast while Tom sits at the table. Samuel describes Adam's renovations to the Sanchez house—new floors, paint, a garden with spring water, roses from Boston. Liza disapproves of pig smell and Cathy's idleness. Samuel tells Liza that Adam wants him to bore four or five wells and install windmills and storage tanks at fifty cents a foot. Liza doubts Adam will pay, recalling past unpaid promises. Samuel wants to take Tom and Joe, but Liza insists Joe is too delicate. Joe asks to go; Samuel publicly refuses but privately arranges for Joe to persuade Liza. Two days later, the wagon departs with all three.
Analysis
The chapter opens in a sustained third-person close to Samuel's consciousness, moving from vivid nocturnal panorama to intimate psychological excavation. The moonlit landscape—the "moon-dry" hills, open places "white without color," the predator-prey drama of night creatures—establishes a world of heightened perception where beauty and predation coexist. This dual atmosphere mirrors Samuel's own condition: riding home through beauty, he feels a creeping dread he cannot locate.
Steinbeck structures the chapter as a descent: the physical journey, then the emotional diagnosis, then the deep memory of Londonderry, then the return to present domestic life. The Londonderry flashback is the chapter's centerpiece, rendered with full sensory immersion—cobbles, crowd pressure, the golden man's depthless eyes, the father's cupping hands. The parallel between the hanged man's eyes and Cathy's eyes is never stated outright; Samuel arrives at it through circling and testing, rejecting rationalizations ("Some accident of eye shape and eye color"), and finally accepting a resemblance that transcends physical description: "It's a look and has no reference to shape or color."
The domestic second section shifts tone sharply. Liza's kitchen is a world of crisp moral certainties—pig smell that "nothing can wash out or cover up," sin in lying abed, idleness as "devil's tools." Her interrogation of Samuel about Cathy (her hands, her name, her origin) counterpoints his own troubled intuition: Liza probes with practical suspicion what Samuel has felt with mystical dread. The breakfast scene's warmth—hot cakes "like little hassocks," Dessie's surprise shop plans—tempers the first section's darkness. The chapter ends with the wagon departing, Joe's inclusion resolved through a winking conspiracy between father and sons, Samuel's moral seriousness giving way to comedy.
Key quotes from Part Two, Chapter 16
“It’s not his hanging sorrows me but that they make a holiday of it that should be done secretly, in the dark.”
Samuel's father says this to the boy at the pub after the public hanging in Londonderry.
“He had to be killed. Not once but many times he did dreadful things—things only a fiend could think of.”
Samuel's father explains the golden man's crimes at the pub after the hanging.
“And Samuel Hamilton resolved to help greatly with the Salinas Valley Eden, to make a secret guilt-payment for his ugly thoughts.”
The narrator reports Samuel's decision to dismiss his troubling intuition about Cathy and assist Adam Trask.
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Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Part Two, Chapter 16
- blackguarding
- Verbally abusing or speaking badly of someone; criticizing or insulting in a harsh, unrestrained way. Here used in the phrase 'the pot blackguarding the kettle,' meaning one guilty party criticizing another.