‘Strong as a bull.’ This leaves George the awkward task of getting out of the situation so that they could keep their jobs. I also feel sympathy for George because he could apparently be a lot better off if he was not with Lennie. We see evidence of this when Lennie was talking to an image of his Aunt Clara, and she says:
‘You never give a thought to George … all the time he coulda had such a good time if it wasn’t for you.’
Another character I feel sympathy for is Crooks. I feel a lot of sympathy for him because he is treated so differently from the other workers just because he was black. There is a good example of this when crooks explains to Lennie:
‘Maybe you can see now. You got George…s’pose you didn’t have nobody. S’pose you couldn’t go in the bunk-house and play rummy ‘cause you was black.’ We also know that Crooks is lonely, as he explains to Lennie again:
‘S’pose you had to sit out here an’ read books. Sure you could play horseshoes, ‘till it got dark…A guy needs somebody - to be near him.’
Crooks is threatened too, where Curley’s wife says she could have him:
‘…strung up on a tree so fast it aint even funny.’
A threatening atmosphere is also created by the way in which Curley’s wife
‘…closed in on him.’ Pathos is also used to create sympathy for Crooks where Steinbeck describes him as ‘getting smaller’ just after Curley’s Wife asks him the question:
‘You know what I could do?’
I feel a great deal of sympathy for Curley’s wife too, because she is left on her own with no one to talk to and a husband that ‘gets mad’ if she speaks to anyone apart from him. We see this when she explains her situation to Lennie:
‘I never get to talk to nobody. I get awful lonely.’ She explain again to Lennie about how Curley is overprotective of her when she states:
‘I can’t talk to nobody but Curley. Else he gets mad.’ We also see that Curley’s wife is confined to the house with Curley, who ‘Spends all his time sayin what he’s gunna do to guys he don’t like,’ and that ‘he don’t like nobody.’
Curley’s Wife also seems to get left out of the conversations that the men have, and gets very lonely. The men leave her out because they, for some reason, don’t trust her, as they always tell her to go away. Curley’s Wife gets very lonely because Curley is out most of the day, and she has nothing to do. She proclaims this where she says:
‘Why can’t I talk to you? I never get to talk to nobody. I get awful lonely.’
Another action that makes me feel sympathy for her is just before she dies in the barn. I feel sympathy for her then because she’s simply letting Lennie stroke her hair, doing him a favour, and she lost her life in doing so. We know that she is doing him a favour because she says:
‘Here – feel it right here’ and took his hand in hers, and put it on her head.
Curley’s wife also says that she could have had a life in a ‘show’, - she makes it sound better than the one she has. This makes me feel sympathy for her, as she could be doing a lot better for herself, as she reflects and explains to Lennie:
‘Well, a show came through, an’ I met one of the actors. He says I could go with that show.’
I also have sympathy for Lennie, because he doesn’t really know what he’s doing when he gets George and himself in trouble. We see an example of this when George describes what happened in Weed, where Lennie grabs hold of a girls dress, doesn’t let go, and gets George and himself in trouble. Another reason why I feel sorry for Lennie is because he says, when he is talking to an image of his Aunt Clara, that he tired no to ‘do bad things,’ but that he ‘couldn’t help it.’
Yet another reason I feel sympathy for Lennie is when Steinbeck uses Pathos to make you feel sympathetic towards Lennie when he starts talking to Curley’s Wife about his puppy, that he had accidentally killed:
‘Jus my pup, just my little pup.’
I also have sympathy for Lennie when he jumps in a river just because Lennie tells him to. We see this where Lennie explains to Slim:
‘I was felin’ pretty smart. I turns to Lennie and says: ‘Jump in.’ An’ he jumps. Couldn’t swim a stroke. He damn near drowned before we could get him out.’
The characters I feel no sympathy for are Carlston and Curley. I feel no sympathy for Curley because he is always trying to start fights, for example he started punching Lennie for no reason. He also says that he ‘…don’t like nobody.’ Curley is also more concerned with his respect and authority than he is with his wife. We see this illustrated well when he discovered his wife dead, and instead of breaking down and being saddened by the loss, he is organising the murder of Lennie. I have no sympathy for Carlston because he doesn’t console George after he has shot Lennie, but marvels at the apparently good shot. He also has very little tact with regards to shooting Candy’s dog. We see this were he says:
‘Just shoot him right there, right in the back of the head…’
Overall, I have the most sympathy for Crooks, because even though Curley’s Wife paid the ultimate price in the end (her life) she also had a reasonable amount of authority. We see this when it came to speaking to people such as Crooks, where she speaks to him in a scorn, treating him badly, and so not being as worse off than him. An excellent example of the disrespect shown by Curley’s Wife to Crooks is shown where she says:
‘Listen nigger,’ After this particular incident she continued to stand over Crooks, so that she could ‘…whip at him again;’. This shows that crooks, although he didn’t pay the ultimate price, his life, as Curley’s Wife did, his life was actually more miserable – and so I feel even more sympathy for him.
