Chapters
Right now, a whole lot of people are in some pretty dire financial straits. The news is full of stories about people wondering how they'll pay for heating and food. Our government is scrambling for solutions and not finding any. And yet, as tough as our circumstances are, they don't come close to rivalling the desperation that John Steinbeck tells us about.
He wrote Of Mice and Men during the Great Depression. He vividly portrays what conditions were like in Southern California, which was reeling from the effects of the Dust Bowl as well as economic turmoil. He populates his story with many memorable characters:
- George: small and clever but uneducated; he takes it upon himself to care for Lenny
- Lenny: a muscular hulk of limited intelligence; we don't know the basis of his and George's relationship
- Slim: the mule team driver; he's considered the Prince of the Ranch
- Candy lost a hand in a ranching accident; he's older and worried about his future on the ranch
- Curley: cruel and abusive, he suffers from Napoleon Complex
- Curley's wife: disillusioned with being a rancher's wife, she hankers for stardom
- Crooks: the sole Black character; he's shunned because of the colour of his skin
For many of us, the Great Depression is a matter of black-and-white photographs. Two-dimensional images that recall the folly of men satisfying their greed at the expense of the rest of the population. And the world. It's tough to connect those pictures with the people they portray - their lives, and their hopes and dreams. Fortunately, John Steinbeck vividly brings them to life.
Of Mice and Men Overview
This novella was first published in 1937, shortly after John Steinbeck had become a full-time writer, supporting himself with his pen. Of Mice and Men tells the story of two friends who are itinerant farmhands in Southern California. Lenny is large, strong and mentally underdeveloped. George is quick-witted and small.
We don't know much about their relationship or, indeed, their past. They may have been cousins or simply fellows well met. But their unity lies at the heart of the story. The reader observes George's tenderness towards Lenny and the latter's deference to his friend's superior intellect. They express their caring in the rough language of working men. As the story winds to its tragic close, George has to make a terrible decision so that he might have some hope for a life of his own.
Language
Steinbeck writes the novella focusing closely on the spoken voice, like much of his other works. He was an astute observer of everyday people; he took pride in his ability to recreate their voices on the page. Chief among his tools are non-standard verb forms – ‘he done’ to replace ‘he has done’ or ‘he did’ – and contractions – ‘’em’ to replace ‘them’ and ‘di’n’t’ to replace didn’t. Together these tricks help the reader hear the speech as much as read them.
Much of Lennie’s speech consists of repetitive phrases. His introductory scene sees him saying ‘You drink some, George. You take a good big drink.’ This cyclical mannerism seems at once natural and abnormal. What makes Lennie stand out is not that he repeats himself – all of Steinbeck’s characters do, but that he does it so much. Lennie also 'repeats' what George does, mimicking him in a touching attempt to 'act right'. For instance, as he lays back, he crosses his hands under his head like George before ‘raising his head to see whether he were doing it right.’
Lennie and George live in a hardscrabble agricultural world. The animals who fill the book are wild, domesticated or imaginary. Each has a reality assigned to it through Steinbeck’s precise descriptions. The rabbits sit ‘as quietly as little gray, sculptured stones’. The heron doesn't merely fly off, it's ‘labouring up into the air’.
The writer takes time to show his characters and the natural world with an unpretentious eye. This sets his story in a deeply visual, realised world, even though the setting is a very small area of Southern California. William Golding did the same when he set Lord of the Flies in a similarly isolated area. In both of those works, the timing of events spans only a few days.
Of Mice and Men Themes
Steinbeck often wrote about powerless characters. Lenny, though powerfully built, is rendered powerless by a lack of intellect. George, though clever and adaptable, is economically and socially disadvantaged. Indeed, most of the ranch hands are. Crooks because of his skin and Candy, due to his age and lost hand.
They are all filled with longing, too. George dreams of having a place of his own where he and Lenny can finally 'be somebody'. Candy wants security in his old age and Crook craves acceptance. Curley's wife's aspirations are both grand and forlorn. She wishes she could reclaim her chance at fame while wishing her existence wasn't so lonely.
Loneliness permeates this story. Candy is lonely after his dog dies. Crooks is lonely, isolated as he is because of racism. He hints that George and Lenny's relationship was born of loneliness by saying "A guy goes nuts if he ain't got anybody." The land itself is desolate. We know that because the town's name is Soledad - 'solitude', in Spanish.
And, then, there's injustice, a theme that runs through much of Steinbeck's body of work. In this tale, Curley and his father, The Boss, live well and mete out punishment, often unfairly, on their workers. Crooks is discriminated against even though he does his fair share of work, and then some. The whole story takes place during the worst of economic deprivation. Now, let's look closer at other major themes.
Anger
George is a simple man with an admirable concern and love for his friend. What makes him so real is the limitations defeating him at every turn. For instance, when Lennie wants ketchup for his beans, George explodes into a tirade, saying ‘Whatever we ain’t got, that’s what you want.’ His anger seems disproportionate until we consider how long he has been looking after Lennie and how desperate he is for respite.
In some ways, these flashes of anger are a symptom of his own loneliness, made plain when he talks about the life he ‘could live so easy’. Crooks diagnoses it as a ‘loneliness for land’, something Steinbeck would write about time and time again. When George and Lennie paint their most detailed picture of the ‘fatta the lan’’ they do so in Candy's company. The prospect of more company adds fuel to their longing. These men are desperate for a community, however small, where each will be valued.
Curley is dangerous because of his own pent-up anger. He's a small man, constantly exercising superiority to battle back the certainty that he's inferior. We see this when he challenges Lennie to a fight. The bigger man had done little wrong but Curley needed a punchbag. Physical violence and mental cruelty were his ways of working out his frustrations at his wife’s behaviour.
Lennie's frustrations echo everyone else's, particularly George's. However, he expresses his irritation more childishly. For instance, he shouts at the dead puppy: ‘Why do you got to get killed? You ain’t so little as mice.’ Each character in the story struggles with their weaknesses. They haven't the means to help one another in any meaningful way.
Forgiveness
George’s attitude towards Lennie’s inadvertent kill is remarkable. Neither he nor Candy had any liking for Curley’s wife but they both cared deeply about Lennie and sought to help him. George notes that ‘Lennie never done it in meanness.’. He continues, surely thinking over all of Lenny's accidents and mistakes he'd seen: ‘All the time he done bad things, but he never done one of ‘em mean.’
George will become Lennie’s executioner but we realise that he considers his friend entirely innocent. We know that George will willingly forgive Lenny for all the trouble he has caused him. But there’s neither release nor victory for George. In killing Lennie, George loses his own best friend. He destroys his own dream. He casts away the things that made him different to the other swampers: his empathy and his desire to have someone to look out for.
Memory
‘Jesus Christ, Lennie! You can’t remember nothing that happens, but you remember ever’ word I say’. George, Of Mice and Men
Lennie’s memory is a confusing obstacle to both him and George. Even the rote-learnt ‘fatta the lan’’ recitation and the words of Aunt Clara confuse. Why does Lenny only selectively remember things? Without the ability to think for himself or recall at will, Lennie is utterly dependent on George’s guidance.
We never learn what happened in Weed but George remembers it and Lennie remembers the results: ‘We was run off’. He inconveniently remembers much of George’s monologuing. Lenny brings up George's conversation with the girls ‘on Howard Street’ and anything else that will prick George’s conscience. Indeed, Lenny often serves as George's anchor. Without these reminders, perhaps George would be hopeless and would sink into an alcoholic cycle of work and waste. In a sense, rather like the endless drudgery the animals were trying to escape in Orson Wells' Animal Farm.
Of Mice and Men: Final Thoughts
Steinbeck gives us a domestic tragedy, although the household is an unconventional one. The scale of the emotions involved is really dictated by the little world he creates. We know what Lennie’s death means to George and that Slim and Candy have some sorrow, too. Other than that, Lenny's death will not be mourned. From that barren terrain, Steinbeck effectively gives the reader the obligation to care and to act differently.
He didn't make this tale up out of whole cloth. He confided in a 1937 interview that he spent two years living like George and Lenny. He rambled around California, hiring on as a ranch hand. One notable instance saw him on the Spreckels Sugar ranch, harvesting wheat and beets.
That's where he met Lenny. Steinbeck averred that all of the other characters in Mice were composites of the people he met in his travels. But Lenny was Lenny, a big hunk of a man who worked alongside him for a few weeks. Lenny didn't kill anyone's wife. In a profoundly gruesome way, Lenny killed the ranch foreman who had fired his friend. According to Steinbeck, Lenny was remanded to the state mental hospital, where he remained at the time of that interview. What happened to Lenny is not known.
John Steinbeck grew up in the Salinas area of California, roughly 25 miles from where Of Mice and Men is set. His family was financially secure, as evidenced by his graduating from high school and attending Stanford University for five years. However, he failed to earn any degree, instead setting his sights on a writing career.
Clearly, Steinbeck was highly educated. Not to be discriminatory but how did he so effectively capture the illiteracy and lack of refinement many of his characters embodied? We now know that he worked as a ranch hand alongside many such desperate individuals. Many were not native Californians.
In the 1930s, the US plains region endured what later became known as the Dust Bowl. Poor farming practices, coupled with a prolonged drought led to the land no longer being suitable for farming. Eroded topsoil, picked up by gusty winds, caused unending dust storms that made farming impossible. Many people from the Texas panhandle, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas lost everything they had.
Thousands of families, many from Oklahoma, ended up in California. These Okies, as they were called, had distinctive speech patterns and a peculiar dialect. As you read Of Mice and Men, the voices you hear are actually displaced Oklahomans. Should you ever visit that state, you'll hear that dialect spoken still today. And if you need a hand with English, you can book a GCSE English tutor to come to your home from the Superprof website.
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