The dream plays a large part in making of mice and men a tragedy. The dream is the one thing that makes the situation the men are in at all bearable. However no men before ever achieved the dream and with George and Lennie from the start it seems inevitable that their dream in the end will too fail. The dream is built up to the point where it seems it couldn’t fail. George had not believed it at first treating it like a story; he tells it ‘rhythmically as though he had said them many times before,’ However When Candy joins the dream it becomes a reality; he says:
‘I bet we could swing her!’ The fact that the dream has been built up so much, like a fairy tale in which these men escape the society they hate, makes it more tragic when they lose it.
There is an inevitability that Lennie will end up doing something really dangerous. At the start of the book he kills the mice, then he breaks Curley's hand and then he kills the dog. The book is building up to a climax we know that even when George thinks it will happen as he says to Lennie:
‘If you jus happen to get into trouble like you did before come and hide in the brush,’ We retain sympathy for Lennie. Steinbeck doesn’t want us to see Lennie as dangerous and horrible. His simple childlike unawareness makes us always realise that when Lennie does something bad he doesn’t realise. He has no control of idea of his own strength. This makes his death seem very tragic we don’t feel like he deserves to die even if killing him was the right thing for George to do.
The imagery used in of mice and men makes it a tragedy. The constant reference to Lennie as a ‘bear’ and his ‘paws’ make us realise that Lennie is little more than an animal, which makes the foreshadowing with Candy’s dog more effective. The reference to animals also incorporates survival of the fittest, Lennie like is not clever enough to survive and in the end he is killed because of this. Steinbeck uses a method of starting and ending chapters and the whole book with the same image. We see this in chapter four with Crooks. The thee men cover a lot of ground and start to break down prejudices when they talk to each other. However Curley's wife breaks it up by reminding Crooks of his place in an unchanging society. Crooks is left ‘rubbing his back’ the same lonely activity he was doing at the start of the chapter. Steinbeck is showing the reader that whatever happens society and prejudice stay unchanged.
The title of the book ‘of mice and men’ illustrates the feeling of the book. It is from a poem by Burn. The poem talks about a field mouse trying to survive. It is about trying to survive over a greater force and how this goes wrong. This is foreshadowing what will happen later in the book. This makes the failure of the dream seem inevitable which helps to make ‘of mice and men’ a tragedy.
Curley’s wife’s life was tragic. She had dreams of doing things she clearly would never achieve and spent her life unhappy and disliked. Steinbeck wants to tell the reader about how American Society in itself was a tragedy. By using the techniques talked about above he can enforce his point by making ‘of mice and men’ a tragedy.
