Of Mice and Men
Uploaded by Admin on Sep 08, 2000
Of Mice and Men is one of Steinbeck’s best novels. John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, CA he goes back to that setting for this novel. There are five to six characters that Steinbeck develops and opens up to the reader through the novel. Although George, Lennie, Crooks, Candy, and Curly’s wife all seek a place to belong and someone to love as a cure to there loneliness, all their dreams for a better future are destroyed in the novel.
George and Lennie are an unlikely pair of friends who are introduced in the beginning. George is “small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features.”(2) Lennie contradicts George because he is a “huge man, shapeless of face, with large pale eyes, with wide sloping shoulders, and he walked heavily.”(2) George is the more dominant of the two because Lennie is slow in the head. George and Lennie are different from the rest of the people in the same occupation because as Lennie said to George, “because I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s why.”(14) They are also different because as George said, “We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us.”(14) They also share a common goal for their future together. They want to be able to live on there own and have a couple of acres so they can plant things and have animals. They are going to “live off the fatta the lan’.”(14) This single dream makes George and Lennie different from everyone else.
Candy is a nice, old, handicapped man on the ranch. He lost his hand four years earlier in a farm machine while working. Candy overheard George and Lennie discussing about a small piece of land they would like to buy. Candy was compensated $250 for the lost of his hand and has a total of $350 he is willing to invest into the place with George and Lennie. Candy wants to get the place soon because he knows they are going to fire him sometime in the near future. When they fire him he will not have anyone or anything at all. Candy says, “When they can me here I just wisht somebody’d shoot me. But they won’t do nothing like that. I won’t have no place to go.”(60) So, Candy just wants to be...