What is Steinbeck saying about the idea of dreams in the novel? What characters have dreams and what does this show?

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What is Steinbeck saying about the idea of dreams in the novel? What characters have dreams and what does this show?

Most people have some kind of dream. A dream is something to indulge in, a means of escaping momentarily from the harsh reality of life. The beauty of a dream is that it gives a person a purpose in life. However these dreams are often thwarted by many obstacles along the way, as the characters of John Steinbeck’s “Of mice and Men” discover.  

This is a novel of defeated hope and the unkind reality of the American Dream. The main characters, George and Lennie are poor migrant workers, condemned to a life of wandering and hard work in which they are never able to reap the fruits of their labour.
Their dreams were not uncommon among Americans at the time of the Great Depression (the biggest economic decline in the history of the USA). Their dream was a simple one: a place of their own, the opportunity to work for themselves and harvest what they sew with no one to take anything from them or give them orders. George wants a place where he and Lennie can live away from the discrimination and prejudices presented by society towards them:

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”We'd jus' live there. We'd belong there. There wouldn't be no more runnin' round the country and gettin' fed by a Jap cook. No, sir, we'd have our own place where we belonged and not sleep in no bunk house".

The dream is summed up well by Candy, “Everybody wants a bit of land, not much, jus som’thin’ that was his”. George and Lennie desperately cling to the notion that they are different from other workers who drift from ranch to ranch because, unlike the others, they have a future and each other. However characters like Crooks and Curley's ...

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