What is the world's story about?

At first i was not too sure about this book. I disliked so many of the characters in the beginning. I didn't know what Steinbeck was trying to get across. However, I always wanted to find out more. And in the end I loved the story. I love Lee. Caleb is one of the most interesting characters I have ever met in a novel. This is definitely a book I wish I had been able to read in school and discuss with a class along the way. All this symbolism and these various themes- I am sure I missed half of it. I kind of want to go read the Old Testament now to piece a few more things together (I've never read it! gasp). There is a quote on page 324 (of my version) and I feel that most of the time I was reading this book like Samuel, whereas it needed to be read the way Tom would read it.

"And the books that came into the house, some of them secretly- well, Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands."

I want to send this book to my little brother, who struggles, well, with a lot of things, but maybe it would help him see he has a choice to find the good in himself, the good in others.

From Chapter 34:
"A child may ask, "What is the world's story about?" And a grown man or woman may wonder, "What way will the world go? How does it all end, and while we're at it, what's the story all about?"

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught- in their lives, in their thoughts, in the hungers and ambitions, in their rice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity- in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well- or ill?

...We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing in the world is."