...and then by her unfortunate marriage to Curley, whom... she does not even like." (Attell) All of her attempts to talk to the other characters, disastrous as they potentially might be, can be seen as attempts to make any kind of human contact. The solution for the farmhands in their loneliness is more simple -- they need to learn to reach out and make friends, and commit to each other as people in their journey. Curley's wife has a more difficult quest before her, because she has already tried to take that first step (marrying Curley was no doubt an attempt to break out of her loneliness), and now any further steps are being restricted by him. On can definitely see why she asks, "Wha's the matter with me? Ain't I got a right to talk to nobody? Whatta they think I am, anyways? You're a nice guy. I don't know why I can't talk to you... I ain't used to living like this." (Steinbeck, 862) Yet she too is not totally helpless. She could originally have made different decisions, and not married someone with whom she had nothing truly in common. Even at this moment, she could choose to leave Curley and seek out a form of life that would allow her to communicate and share with others. Regardless of these things, one also senses that her eventually death is somehow directly related to her cruel words to Crook and her refusal to give Lennie the space he needs -- in this, she, like the others, is very much the master of her fate. George and Lennie of course are the ultimate example of the balance between love and loneliness, and George typifies the way in which all of these characters inexplicably choose to be lonely rather than do the extra work to bring love into their life. He is well aware of the deep, soul crushing loneliness that can follow his profession. To understand the dynamic of what happens with George and Lennie, one must start by listening to George's reasons why the two have been traveling together. It turns out that combatting loneliness is the very reason why they are together: "Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place. ... We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. We don't have to sit in no bar room blowin' in our jack jus' because we got nobody ..." (Steinbeck, 806) It is because of this that they believe "We got a future." (Steinbeck, 806) This togetherness lets them dream. " Against the exposition of the itinerant laborer's lonely life of moving and working, Steinbeck counterposes the dream that George and Lennie share. As mentioned above, it is not just any dream, or even simply the dream of a better life. In the opening chapter, when George repeats (as he often does) the story for Lennie he begins not by talking about their own individual plans but rather about the state of many men like them." (Attell) However, despite the fact that having Lennie present allows George to access dreams and company he otherwise could not, Lennie is also something of a burden. It was because of him that they had been chased from the last town, and of course Lennie continues to cause problems here with Curley. Most readers see this burdensomeness as having little to do with the final results of the story. Yet it sees perfectly logical to think that the fact that Lennie was a burden -- even a life threatening one --she have something to do with the fact that he does pose something of a burden to those around him. This...
. . .cat house. . . ." (875) When a few pages later George shoots Lennie, execution style, on wonders to what was truly influencing him -- was it that has is being merciful to Lennie, or was he secretly participating. At the story's end when Slim is reassuring George about having killed Lennie, he keeps repeating "You hadda, George... I swear you hadda." (Steinbeck p. 878) This creates for the reader "a sense of completeness, of both defeat and satisfaction," (Scarseth, 94) to such a degree that even critics say "George kills him mercifully. It's a horrible thing to do, and George knows that. And we know that. But in this limited world in this limited way it is all that George can do for his friend." (Scarseth, 94) Of course, this is also nonsense. He didn't have to shoot his friend in the back of the head. There were plenty of other options, including having worked harder to stop the mob, to make arrangements with the sheriff, or even to have misled the mob long enough to sneak back and take Lennie on the run. Law enforcement in those days was not so perfect that a pair of migrant workers could not vanish easily. If George had been the one in danger of being killed by a mob, one doubts he would have shot himself! George will become yet another lonely drifter because he, like all the other drifters, in the final analysis prefers the easy road of destroying or ignoring love and friendship for the sake of quick cash, gambling, whores and isolation.
John Steinbeck, why soldiers won't talk. "Why soldiers won't talk:" John Steinbeck's imaginative essay on the psychological impact of war One of the most interesting aspects of John Steinbeck's essay "Why Soldiers Won't Talk" is the way in which he subtly shifts from the first person to the second person in the essay. He begins the essay stating that he himself is not a soldier: "During the years between the last war and
John Steinbeck's Morose Preoccupation John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is a somewhat strange, surprising read. The author selects a very unlikely setting, a farm populated predominantly by hired hands, for a tale that is largely predicated on the conception of friendship and its myriad interpretations -- and applications. However, there is a definite undercurrent that some readers might find disturbing that is present in some of the most poignant notions
John Steinbeck's novel, Of Mice and Men, the character of Curley's Wife is a tragic figure. Both flaws within her own character and the lack of opportunities and roles for women in the early 1930s in America play a role in her tragic fate. Of Mice and Men tells the story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two illiterate men who travel together looking for work from ranch to ranch
authors, John Steinbeck puts a lot of himself in his novels. In his novels we can see self-characters, representing Steinbeck himself in some ways and also hidden characters that represent his family, his friends and the events of his life. We also see how the people he met in his life resulted in his interest in some major themes that are seen in many of his novels. The greatest
A gift like this should be a time of joy, but with Jody's hard-edged dad, it was more tension than joy. "God's preference seems arbitrary and apparently denies Cain free will," Etheridge writes, alluding again to Cain and Able. And there is also an element of "laying down the law" in what Carl Tiflin said to his son. And Tiflin leaves the job of showing Jody how to care
They work when they can picking crops, but agitators create a violent atmosphere, after wages are cut due to the overabundance of pickers. People are starving and the law is harsh with locked out strikers who fight with desperate workers who become "scabs." This is a forceful story about how a proud family survives, and about the humanity in even the meanest of men. Of Mice and Men George and
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