Loneliness and Friendship in Of Mice And Men

Loneliness and Friendship

The novel “of mice and men” takes place in the early 1930’s when America was going through a really bad crisis. The economic condition was very down, it was at the time that almost every American were travelling looking for jobs, migrated from one country to an other just to get a stable life.

The two main characters in the novel George and Lennie had a strong friendship.

“George was small and quick, dark face with restless eye and sharp, he had strong failures. Every part of him was defined; he had small, strong hand slender arms a thin and bony nose. Lennie was huge, shapeless of face with large pole eye with wide slapping shoulders” that how the Steinbeck describe them.

They had a very strong friendship which kept them travelling together, which were very unusual at that time. On a lot of occasions in the novel people ask George and his companion “ Do you always travel together?”

The friendship of the both of them is highlighted in the story and their relationship appears to be a little bit as father and son, George was the one with the father role and Lennie because of his mental immaturity was always relying on George, somewhere in the story we see George saying to Lennie “for god sake Lennie don’t drink to much you gonna be sick like you was last night”.

From that kind of expression we can see that George does care about Lennie. George always travels with Lennie because they share the same background and George made a promise to look after Lennie to his Aunt Clara, but later in the story we see George talking to Slim them saying, “ it’s a lot nicer to travel with someone you know” therefore the fact that George always travel with Lennie is not a sign of sympathy for his aunt Clara but it also that he (George) enjoy travelling with Lennie, and later in his conversation with Slim is says “ we kind of look after each other.”

George and Lennie’s friendship is loyal and solid, each one of them were benefiting, they both do care about each other like for example when Crooks tells him to imagine that George is not going to come back, Lennie gets scared to even imagine something like that happening, and Lennie loved and respect George that he would not allowed anyone to do something to him for example when he says to Crooks “aint nobody talks no hurt to George”. Others characters in the story found it strange for them travelling together “ I never seen a guy take so ...

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The solitary characters in this novel are Curley’s wife, Candy and Crooks that the writer created for us to understand the level of loneliness that existed at that time, and at that time (with all the level of depression) people had to leave their home and families, and this leads to loneliness and insecurity, and in this context the ranch (where they’re working) following George speech “ Guys who works on ranches are the looniest guy in the world” shows as that working in ranches did not change the fact that people were lonely because it was isolated and there wasn’t much friendship going on around.

Candy is an old man who has a disability he has only got one hand. When everyone is out working Candy stays at the ranch all alone and clean.

Candy is so afraid of how his future will be he so scared that he thinks that when he will get really older, people would not want him or care about him anymore than he will not have anywhere to go like when he says “I won’t have no places to go, an I cant get no more jobs”. Candy thinks that in order to stop that happening he decided to joint Lennie and George in their dream to buy a ranch and he knows it could be possible because he had some savings on him “s’pose I went in with you guys”, so from here we can see how lonely this man was, with no family at all he decide to buy a ranch with some strangers that he doesn’t know that much and willing to give them everything “I’d make a will an’ leave my share to you guys in case I kick off cause I ain’t got no relatives nor nothings”. His old dog is very important for him because he had him since he was a “pup,” so since he had his hand cut through the machine his dog has been the only one that he can turn to, that’s why even though the dog was old and smelly he couldn’t let him die, when Carlton shot the old dog Candy had a pain in side him because that was he’s only companion.

Curley’s wife is the only female character in the novel, married to the boss’s son named Curley; her marriage to him seems to be an escape from her lonely life, she was really insecure and lonely physically and emotionally. However, she attempts to overcome her loneliness in the wrong way, she walks around the ranch, dressed inappropriately and seductively and we have to remember that she only been married two weeks ago. The men at the ranch sees her as a trouble maker or as a test for them that they all stayed away from her, without knowing that she gets really lonely to not being able to speak to anyone

“I get lonely…you can talk to people but I can’t to no one apart from Curley” and it is not good for her because se needs to talk to people, and it is really annoying for her that fact that she can’t communicate with anyone. Despite all her loneliness Curley’s wife had a dream her dream was to become a movie star “ could have been in the movies and wear nice clothes”

Because of her loneliness she started flirting with Lennie. Lennie confided in her saying that he likes stroking nice thing, so because Lennie was the only person that she could talk to and because it is partly her desire to be petted and admired she allowed him to strokes her beautiful long hair, but at the end Lennie broke her neck because the stroking become harder. This affected Lennie’s and George lives as at the ends Lennie get killed by George him self and their dream stopped.

Crooks is the only black man in the novel, through his character we can see how black people were treated in America at that time. Crooks does not live with the other in the bunkroom, he’s isolated in his own room at the back. Nobody was going in his room and he never joined the other men, Crooks was scared and bullied from the others, they used to call him “Nigger” they don’t really mean it in an offending way but the use of this term show us how black men like him were degraded physically and verbally and he was really affected by that, his opinion or what he says did not have ay importance on the others, we can understand that when he says to Lennie “This is just a nigger talking’, an a busted-back nigger. So it doesn’t mean anything”. Like Candy, he couldn’t do much work like the others because he has a hump back,

He’s only distraction was he’s books, while the other go out to town and have drink Crooks was reading in his room, and sometimes he really wanted to talk to someone, he was really depress by that fact “A guy need someone to be near him, a guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody” that was Crooks reaction to Lennie although Lennie couldn’t understand him properly but Crooks was a bit happy to have someone to hear him out.

Conclusion

In a conclusion I must say that in the world that the writer John Steinbech created in this novel there are a lot of people whose lives are sad and lonely. The language that he used can make us understand the type of life that people endured in the time of the Depression in America.