Several characters in Of Mice and Men are trapped or feel as if they are caught in a trap.
How does Steinbeck show the causes and effects of being tapped?
Write about:' how and why different character feel trapped'
The different ways characters respond to being trapped how Steinbeck makes the reader feel admiration, dislike or pity for characters who are trapped
Look at the following pairs of relationships in Of Mice and Men:
Candy and his dog; Curly and his wife; George and Lennie. Write about these three relationships, showing how Steinbeck explores the needs that keeps relationships going, despite conflict and strain.
Question 1
Steinbeck shows the causes and effects of being trapped by introducing George and Crooks in to the novel.
He introduces crooks racially but he didn’t mean it racially. Crook was a black character and so he was isolated from everyone else. He wasn’t allowed to mingle with the white boys as his father told him when he was younger. This must have made him feel isolated. He also must have felt racially prejudice because he couldn’t live with the white people he must have thought hang on a minute I’m not having this because this is favouring someone else over him just because they are a different coloured skin. He reacted to prejudice himself by doing what his father told him to do but when he finally had the chance to meet a white person and talk to them (Lennie) he took advantage and started taunting Lennie which probably made him feel really uncomfortable. We know this was true because he said to Lennie that George had left him and because Lennie is so dumb he believed him (this is an impression of taunting in the book). He introduces George’s character in the book because he felt trapped but under different circumstances. George felt trapped by Lennie’s need. It would be a big responsibility for someone even now to look after someone who is as dumb and mind disturbed as Lennie. He was a very fragile and vulnerable. George had a big responsibility of looking after Lennie and this must have made him feel trapped because of the way that he was always there, near him and could never get away from him apart from when he went into the town in the day. George ‘s need for Lennie also was trapped, as George wanted a companion someone to travel with because if you don’t have a companion then really you don’t have much. Before George took Lennie on to travel with him we were told as past piece that George is saying that he used to get real lonely when he travelled alone. The last trapping of George is the illusion of the American dream with Lennie. George got so tied up in this dream that he was trapped and couldn’t get out. He wanted this dream so much “to live of fatta the lan” and to be a success in this dream he wanted it to happen for not just himself but Lennie as well. He got so illussional into the dream that in the end the dream ended when he shot Lennie. All of the time the dream was going to waste but they never saw that it was happening. When other characters in the play are trapped they respond in different (peculiar) ways than what crooks and George responded like. Curly responded to entrapment by violence. He thought that violence was the answer all of the time but really it’s not. He thought he was really good but he only fought to people who he thought he could fight e.g. the brutal and unapproved attack on gentle Lennie immediately follows the scene in which the sympathetic characters realise they have a chance for a good and independent future. Curly’s two other ideas to respond to the entrapment that I read in the novel are:
