‘An live off the fatta the lan,’”
This shows how Lennie is like a big kid and how George is the parent telling the bedtime story to Lennie, the child. Lennie tells the bits that he knows like a child would do.
They work at ranches because they have no money, and to accomplish their dream they need to have enough money to buy the land. They have no money because of the depression and to a certain extent because of Lennie. George cannot get a reliable job and take care of Lennie at the same time. and because of the depression it is hard to find jobs.
The American Dream is a belief that you can accomplish your dream if you try hard enough to get it. In the USA everyone believed in this. The farm is George and Lennie’s American dream.
George’s dream, although identical to Lennie’s, is probably more detailed and complicated. Lennie thinks as far as “tendin the rabbits”, but George has to worry about whether it would be possible to really “live off the fatta of the lan”, or would they starve?
Lennie, with his child-like mentality, believes whatever he hears, so when George tells him that they will really get their own land, he believes it with all his heart.
To Lennie, the question is not if, but when:
“George, how long’s it gonna be till we get that little place an’ live on the fatta the lan’ – an’ rabbits?”
Lennie is fixated on rabbits and doesn’t think about anything else for a lot of the time. He didn’t seem to concentrate when George told him that they didn’t have to work when they didn’t want to or they could have friends round or they could do what they wanted when they wanted, the most important thing for him was to tend the rabbits.
Candy does not seem to have a dream until he meets George and Lennie. He is swept up in the plausible reality of this dream, a dream he would probably be too scared to initiate by himself. Candy is not happy with his life on the ranch, but he doesn’t think that there is anything else that he can do. He has one arm and is quite an old man, he used to have a dog that was also very old and someone else shot it for him.
He was very miserable after the death of his dog and he said, “I ought to of shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn’t ought to have let no stranger shoot my dog.”
His dog was the only precious possession he had at the ranch and it was taken away from him.
He overheard George and Lennie talking about their dream and later approached them and told them his generous offer. He had more than half of the money they needed to buy some land that George heard about. He could ensure a piece of land for George and Lennie and himself. There was only one problem, they had to work for another month to get enough money and it depended on nothing going wrong.
At the beginning of the novel, there are already some doubts as to whether the pair will achieve their dreams. Before the two arrived at this ranch the two men had to leave Weed because of some trouble that Lennie caused. He likes to touch and pet things, but he is a big kid so he does bad things but he doesn’t even realise it. Firstly, he held on to the girl’s dress in Weed and she got the wrong impression so, she started to scream and they had to run out of Weed. Then on the way to this ranch Lennie killed a rat by petting it to hard and he killed the pup given to him as well.
He doesn’t know his own strength, he crushed Curley’s hand and even managed to break Curley’s wife’s neck and kill her without even realising a long time after.
The problem was Lennie. Something was bound to go wrong and it did eventually.
Lennie, although killed by George, really died when Curley’s wife set her sights on the big man. When George meets up with Lennie after the accident, he knows the dream is over for him too. He also knew what he had to do as soon as he found out what Lennie had done, why else would he have stolen Carson’s Luger?
As George is preparing to kill Lennie, he tells him one last time about “how it’s gonna be.” This last bedtime story for Lennie seems to describe not a little farm that they might buy, but the heaven someone might go to in their after life. As Lennie begs George “Le’s do it now. Le’s go to that place now”, and George replies “Sure, right now. I gotta. We gotta”, and then pulls the trigger, the pair seem at peace with themselves, and each other.
George knows what he is doing is right, and he knows that Lennie would agree if he had the time to explain his reasoning to him. If Lennie could comprehend the reasoning behind George’s actions, he would realise that George was taking Candy’s unknowingly offered advice:
“I ought to of shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn’t ought to have let no stranger shoot my dog.”
Rather then letting Curley shoot Lennie in the guts with a shotgun, and leave him to die a slow and painful death, George decides to offer his friend one last token of companionship, a painless way out into the land of their dream.