Amanuel Berhan Loneliness in the short novel "Of Mice and Men".

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Amanuel Berhan                Loneliness in the short novel “Of Mice and Men”

Mr Toft 10.03

O Mice and Men is a poignant tale of the extraordinary friendship between two itinerant workers in the harsh depression years of 1930’s America. Of Mice and Men is set in the 1930’s America during the Great Depression. During this period of time there was a depression in America. Unemployment was high, so men moved from ranch to ranch looking for work, never staying in one place long enough to firm any real relationships, so this was a very lonely existence. John Steinbeck uses a fairly journalistic style of writing to describe the ranch, and this adds a touch of realism to the story. The characters and places he creates seem real, and he uses real places to mark the general area that the story is set in, the Salinas River, for example. During the years 1919 - 1926 John Steinback undertook a series of manual, unskilled jobs, one of which was a farm labourer on ranches from King to South Clara in Northern California. It was this experience, which seems subsequently to have provided Steinback with the setting for the short novel Of Mice and Men.


Loneliness is a disease. It eats away at people slowly; gradually tearing them limb from limb. It is a virus that sends some people insane, some turn senile, it sorts the strong characters from the weak and it can devastate lives. In the book of Mice and Men I am going to look at 3 different characters are Candy, George and Curley’s Wife

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Candy is lonely because he has lived his life and the outcome of it is he being stuck on a farm. In the novel we are given the impression of Candy being old by

“The door opened and a tall, stoop-shouldered old man came in.”

He is 60-80yrs old or older and because of this his options are limited. For example, he is old and so he can’t travel much. He’s not able to leave his current job unless he had a job waiting for him somewhere else and if not then well him finding a job ...

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