What happens in Part Two, Chapter 17 of East of Eden?
The chapter opens with the narrator reflecting on Cathy, wondering whether calling her a monster was truly fair, since her motives remain unknowable. We see Cathy in late pregnancy on the Trask farm: physically distorted by her enormous belly yet otherwise girlish, remote, and silent, secretly eating chalk stolen from the carpenters. Adam busies himself happily with his plans while Samuel Hamilton and his sons drill a second well nearby.
At the well site, Samuel's drill strikes a buried object thirty feet down. Examining the metal scrapings, Samuel concludes it is a meteorite and conjures a vivid vision of its ancient oceanic impact for his sons Tom and Joe. The moment is broken when Lee arrives on horseback to report that Cathy is in hard labor.
Samuel rides to the Trask house, sends a resistant Adam from the bedroom, and delivers the baby — in fact twins, each born in its own sack — with startling speed. During the delivery Cathy bites deeply into Samuel's hand; he must choke her to make her release it. After the birth she refuses to look at or acknowledge the boys, and Samuel tells her bluntly that he does not like her. Lee treats Samuel's wound and the two men share a foreboding neither can name. Samuel sends Lee to fetch his wife Liza, then passes a feverish three days recovering at home.
Liza spends a week at the Trask place, sets the household in order, and reports to Samuel that Lee is secretly a Presbyterian — a discovery that satisfies her that the twins are in safe hands. Two weeks later Cathy, dressed for travel, waits until Lee has been sent away on an errand and Adam is alone. She tells Adam she is leaving. He locks her in the bedroom; she feigns softness to make him open the door, then shoots him in the shoulder with his own .44 Colt, drops the gun beside him, and walks out into the night. Adam lies on the floor while the twins cry, unfed, in the next room.
Analysis
The chapter is built around three acts of revelation: the meteorite discovered in darkness underground, the violent birth of the twins, and Cathy's departure. Steinbeck uses the meteorite as a structural mirror for Cathy: both are ancient, hard, buried, and destructive to any tool that tries to bore into them. Samuel's lyrical evocation of the meteorite's prehistoric impact — a tree of blinding light arcing from heaven, a great water spout, and killed fish surfacing silver in the starlight — gives Tom and Joe a moment of shared wonder before the chapter's mood darkens irreversibly.
Point of view shifts fluidly. The chapter opens with the first-person narrator meditating on Cathy's inscrutability, then moves to close third-person narration. This framing prepares the reader for a Cathy who cannot be explained, only witnessed.
Darkness and light function as a sustained motif. Cathy insists on blanketed windows throughout the birth and again at the end; Samuel and Liza are repeatedly associated with bringing light into the house.
Samuel Hamilton carries the chapter's emotional weight. His exchange with Lee about demonology, and their shared premonition of "dreadfulness," builds dread through understatement.
Liza Hamilton's brief section provides tonal relief — brisk, comic, practical — before the chapter snaps shut with the gunshot and the cry of the unfed twins, an image that fuses the domestic and the catastrophic.
Key quotes from Part Two, Chapter 17
“She tossed the pistol on the floor beside him and walked out of the house.”
After shooting Adam in the shoulder, Cathy calmly discards the weapon and leaves.
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