demon

If Steinbeck wrote Grapes of Wrath like this then I was blind and dumb back in high school.  I ... eh ... meh ...

"When I said Cathy was a monster it seemed to me that it was so.  Now I have bent close with a glass over the small print of her and reread the footnotes, and I wonder if it was true.  The trouble is that since we cannot know what she wanted, we will never know whether or not she got it.  If rather than running toward something, she ran away from something, we can't know whether she escaped.  Who knows but that she tried to tell someone or everyone what she was like and could not, for lack of a common language.  Her life may have been her language, formal, developed, indecipherable.  It is easy to say she was bad, but there is little meaning unless we know why."

East of Eden

John Steinbeck