We start to form opinions of the characters, we are drawn towards Lennie due to him being described as a bear, which shows his soft and gentle side but also incorporates power and the tendency to hold on to things.
The way they speak and look shows the difference in their characters, George walking in front is described as “small and quick... with sharp strong features. This description of George suggests that he is alert and intelligent, and this continues throughout the story. Lennie however is described using animal adjectives for example he behaves similar to a horse and bear, which ties together the nature scene in the beginning, this also continues throughout the story.
The characters start to show their true characteristics and relationships when they speak to each other. The language they use reveals that they are uneducated. You can tell this because it is colloquial, containing slang and swearing and the way the writer spells certain words phonetically, which helps to capture the American accent. “Blubberin’ like a baby! Jesus Christ! A big guy like you.”
One of the ways the opening section is effective is that is gives you clues which suggests, that there could be problems ahead, George refers to trouble in Weed in this section. Then Later in the story George tells Slim that when they used to work in Weed, Lennie and him had to flee and hide in an irrigation ditch to avoid an angry mob, because Lennie got accused of raping a girl, were in fact he was only stroking her dress because he likes to stroke nice soft things, which ties in later which results in him killing the puppy, which was given to him by Slim by stroking it too hard, Later in the story he kills yet another thing, Curly’s wife. He didn’t mean to kill her, they were talking in the barn when he told her that he liked to stroke nice, gentle things that’s when she invited him into stroke her hair, she then became frightened when he started to stroke it a little too hard and she started shouting, in his panic Lennie held on to her hair which caused her to scream so lennie out of sheer panic and frustration held onto her mouth to stop her screaming, “Now don’t,….. I don’t want you to yell. You gonna get me in trouble jus’ like George says you will. Now don’t you do that” He grew angry at her and tried to stop her screaming because “she had done a bad thing and now he had done a bad thing”, and he shook her; and her body flopped like a fish. And then she was still, for Lennie had broken her neck.
The clues also introduce the main themes of the story, the themes of loneliness and Friendship. The theme loneliness is introduced in the beginning describing that George and Lennie are itinerant workers, which are always alone, “Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world” the theme is also continued later in the story. The theme Friendship is shown all the way through the story, we are shown that George cares for Lennie but in the end George shoots Lennie in the back of the head out of friendship because George realises that this time its different, they cant get away from the law and that its better to kill Lennie now than, Lennie getting caught by curly and the rest of the men who would certainly torture and kill him, he also might of killed another person in the future if he had not been shot.
We can therefore see how Steinbeck uses this opening scene to introduce the main characters and their relationship between each other which will help us understand the rest of the story.