‘“We’ll have a big vegetable patch and a rabbit hutch and chickens…let’s have different color rabbits, George.’ ‘Sure we will,’ George said sleepily. ‘Red and blue and green rabbits, Lennie. Millions of ‘em.’ ‘Furry ones, George like I seen in the fair in Sacramento.’”
However, these dreams are clues given by Steinbeck so that Steinbeck can make us the reader’s realise that these goals are impossible. This is because Lennie and George are two lonely farm workers.
The ending of ‘Of Mice and Men’ is very violent with the death of the main character, Lennie. Lennie could have lived with the fact that his dream wasn’t going to happen and he was going to be a worker all his life. The death of Lennie seems like an act of mercy because Lennie was an innocent victim who was caught up in a life where they were set to be hurt but did nothing bad to bring it upon themselves.
Some scenes in the novel focus on various aspects of the book where we as the readers can concentrate on one character at a time or an event at a time. Steinbeck can describe more thoroughly the event or character instead of telling a long story. This is a very effective method of writing and this keeps the reader interested and builds a clear image of the character.
The language used in the novel is both standard American English and Formal English. In the novel, Steinbeck also uses slang, “Awright”, “Fatta” and “Whatta”. Steinbeck uses a lot of Colloquial language and dialogue as the ranchmen speak a lot during the story and it is often incorrect with slang or swearing. This adds brightness and colour to the description. There is a lot of characterisation through dialogue as each character speaks differently. Steinbeck also uses dialogue to inject humour.
“His authority was so great that his word was taken on any subject, he looked kindly at the two in the bunkhouse. It’s brighter’n a bitch outside”.
In the novel the main two characters are Lennie and George. Lennie is a huge man who is clumsy; “You always killed ‘em’.” This means that Lennie has the strength to kill a creature in his palm e.g. the mouse. He is also childish because he is dumb and he was born like that.
‘“I could pet it with my thumb while we walked along’”
He is also strong because he has the strength, which he doesn’t know about:
“…A huge man, shapeless of face, with large, pale eyes, with wide, sloping shoulders; and he walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws. His arms did not swing at his sides, but huge loosely.”
Animal imagery is used to describe Lennie:
“Lennie dabbled his paw in the water and wiggled his fingers”.
This shows us Lennie’s build and the way his body moves as bears have paws and they move steadily with slow large movements. Lennie always talks about rabbits and this relates back to Lennie being described as an animal.
But as for George, George is totally opposite to Lennie. George is loving because he looks after Lennie:
“…I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you…”
George is small compared to Lennie; he is caring, agile and lonely:
“…Small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong hands, slender arms, a thin and bony nose.”
The other characters in the novel are Candy, Curley, Curley’s wife and Slim. Candy is an old man and is very friendly. He is a worker at the farm. Curley likes little guys but not big guys. He is impressive. He isn’t a big guy and doesn’t like big guys, for example, Lennie. Curley, although, is the bosses son. Curley’s wife is pretty, attractive and a tart that flirts with other men, “purty”. She is kind and good-looking and is married to Curley, but Curley doesn’t know what she does. However, George warns Lennie to stay away from her. Slim is a jerkline skinner. He is a nice person. He doesn’t need to wear no high-heeled boots because he is the worker and the leader at the ranch.
In the first chapter Steinbeck tells us that Lennie and George are two people who are travelling to find work. Before Lennie and George started travelling, Lennie had caused a shocking disaster in Weed. This is because Lennie frightened a girl. George takes good care of Lennie but when Lennie offers to give George his mouse he regrets he becomes meanness. This is because Lennie likes touching pretty things, such as small animals. In this chapter George describes their dream on the ranch.
In the last chapter George shoots Lennie. This is because Lennie had killed Curley’s wife and now everyone is after Lennie. At the start of chapter six, Steinbeck’s description is almost poetic:
“The deep green pool of Salinas River was still in the late afternoon. Already the sun had left the valley to go climbing up the slopes of the Gabilan Mountains, and the hilltops were rosy in the sun. But by the pool among the mottled sycamores, a pleasant shade had fallen”.
This is an intense description of the setting that the characters are in and enables the reader to develop a clear image of the surroundings. It is an example of Steinbeck’s imagery.
However, loneliness affects George and Lennie. The reason how this is because George and Lennie stay in one place long enough to form permanent relationships. Even if such relationships existed, they would probably be destroyed by the demands of the itinerant life. Candy is lonely because he is old, and is different from the other hands. His only comfort is his old do, which keeps him company and reminds him of days when he was youth and whole. He has no relatives, and once his dog is killed he is going to become alone. He eagerly clutches at the idea of buying a farm with George and Lennie. Candy’s disappointment is expressed in the bitter words he utters to the body of Curley’s wife, whom he blames for spoiling his dream. George is also caught in the trap of loneliness. Just as Candy has his dog for company, George has Lennie (who is often described in animal-like terms). Continuing the parallel, George too is left completely alone when Lennie is killed. The dream farm is his idea, and he says:
“we’d belong there…no more runnin’ around the country…”
another lonely character is Curley’s wife. Newly married and in a strange place, she is forbidden by Curley to talk to anyone but him. To counter this, she is constantly approaches the ranch on the excuse of looking for Curley. The only result is that the men regard her as a slut, and Curley becomes even more intensely jealous. Finally, her loneliness leads to her death as she makes the serious error of trying to overcome it by playing the tease with Lennie. Curley himself is lonely. His new wife hates him as do all the ranch hands that despise him for his cowardice. He has married in an attempt to overcome his loneliness, but has blindly chosen a wife totally inappropriate for the kind of life he leads. His feelings are all directed into aggressive behaviour, which further isolates his wife and leads to the incident with Lennie where his hand is crushed. Crooks are another who is isolated because he is different. He copes with it by keeping a distance between himself and the other hands. When he does allow himself to be drawn into the dream of working on George and Lennie’s dream farm, he is immediately shut out by George’s anger.
One of the reasons that the tragic end of George and Lennie’s friendship has such a profound impact is that one senses that the friends have, by the end of the novel, lost dream larger than themselves. The farm on which George and Lennie plans to live, a place that no one ever will reach to, has a magnetic quality, as Crooks points out. After hearing a description of only a few sentences, Candy is completely drawn in by its magic. Crooks has witnessed countless men fall under the same silly spell, and still he cannot help but ask Lennie if he can have a patch of garden to tidy there. The men in Of Mice and Men desire to come together in a way that would allow them to be like brothers to one another. That is, they want to live with one another’s best interests in mind, to protect each other, and to know that there is someone in the world dedicated to protecting them. Given harsh, lonely conditions under which these men live, it should come as no surprise that they idealise friendships between men in such a way.
However, the world is too harsh and greedy a place to sustain such relationships. Lennie and George, who come closest to achieving this ideal of brotherhood, are forced to separate tragically. With this, a rare friendship vanishes. This is because Curley and Carlson, who watch George stumble away with grief from his friend’s dead body, represent this. George fails to acknowledge or appreciate it.
Most of the characters in Of Mice and Men admit about their dreams at different stages of life. Before her death, Curley’s wife confesses her desire to be a movie star. Crooks, bitter as he is, allows himself the pleasant fantasy of tidy up a patch of garden on Lennie’s farm one day, and Candy latches on desperately to George’s vision of owning a couple of acres. Before the action of the novel begins, circumstances have robbed most of the characters of these wishes. Curley’s wife, for instance, has resigned herself to an unfulfilling marriage. What makes all of these dreams typically American is that the dreamers wish for a perfect happiness, for freedom to follow their won desires. George and Lennie’s dream of owning a farm, which would enable them to sustain themselves and most importantly offer them protection from an unwelcoming world that represents a American ideal. Their journey, which awakens George to the impossibility of this dream, sadly proves that the bitter Crooks are right.
The novel has many examples of a kind of needless violence. For example, candy relates how the boss gave them whisky and allowed a fight to take place in the bunkhouse. Curley is most obviously violent character, however, and whenever he appears there is a feeling of tension. He is described as pugnacious (aggressive) when we first meet him, and causes George to remark:
“…what the hell’s he got on his shoulder.”
Candy explains that Curley often picks on big guys (a sure sign of trouble for Lennie). In the novel Steinbeck prepares Curley’s anger, which ends at the end in his wish to:
“…shoot him in the guts.”
Carlson is another character associated with violence. He is unconcerned about killing Candy’s dog (and in fact heartlessly cleans the gun in front of Candy). He goes to watch the fun when Curley thinks Slim may be with his wife, and later goads Curley more, threatening to:
“…kick your head off.”
Later he is very keen to get his gun to join in the hunt for Lennie. The last words in the book belong to Carlson, and it is little surprise that they reveal his complete inability to understand George’s feelings about the death of Lennie.
Compared to the other characters, Lennie reveals an unintentional violence. He does not even think to fight back when Curley attacks him, but when he does, it is with huge and uncontrollable force. He has so little control over his own strength that he accidentally kills his puppy, and then minutes later snuffs out the life of Curley’s wife.
His action on these occasions are compared to those of an animal, powerful but thoughtless. As luck would have it Curley’s wife is attracted to him because of the violence he had shown in crushing her husband’s hand.
It is the threat of violence to be used against Lennie that causes George to take the final step of killing his friend.
Steinbeck shows the world of nature to be a beautiful and peaceful one, but threatened by the actions of men. The beginning of the novel sets this pattern, as the creatures at the pool are distributed by George and Lennie’s approach. The ranch and its building, being created by men, are in contrast with the natural world. Notice that the bunkhouse, for example, is quite bare and stark. Even more unnatural is that Candy and Crooks are both deformed and unnatural in appearance. Contrasted to these two characters is Lennie, who almost seems a part of the natural world as he is described in animal farms. In fact, one of Lennie’s dreams is to go and live by himself in a cave. Maybe this would be the only way in which the natural world of Lennie would not come into conflict with the world of men.
Steinbeck explores different types of strengths and weaknesses throughout the novel. The first, and most obvious, is physical strength. As the novel opens, Steinbeck shows how Lennie has the physical strength beyond his control, as when he cannot help killing his mice. Great physical strength is, like money, quite valuable to men in George and Lennie’s circumstances. Curley, as a symbol of authority on the ranch and a champion boxer, makes this clear immediately by using his rough strength and violent temper to threaten the men and his wife. Physical strength is not the only force that bothers the men in the novel. It is the unbending, greedy human trends, not Curley, that defeat Lennie and George in the end. Lennie’s physical size and strength proves powerless; in the face of these universal laws, he is utterly defenceless and therefore disposable.
However, Steinbeck approaches the relationship in a very special way. This is how by the boss being suspicious. This means that the boss was suspicious because Lennie did not say a word to him when he approached the boss, however, George spoke behalf of Lennie.
“one guy take so much trouble for another guy”
Curley also makes a similar comment. But Crooks, however, he appears to be envies of the relationships because of his own loneliness. Therefore, this upsets Lennie out of spite.
The only person who actually seems to understand the relationship is Slim. Slim is sympathetic and George confides in him. He gives us hope for the future, another friendship is forming.
George becomes frustrated by his friendship with Lennie. He also gets annoyed when he forgets things. However, George needs Lennie. This is because Lennie is the driving force of the dream, he gives him the incentive to carry on.
However, the language and structure used in Of Mice and Men was written in the 3rd persons view, but the writer seems ‘invisible’, but can still see everything that goes on. It uses simple language and straightforward vocabularoy. The story is told in a direct and plain way. This echo’s the lives of the characters. It also uses different speech for different characters, for example, Lennie sentences are very childlike in a character.
