Though the boss seems fair-minded, treating his men to whiskey at Christmas and giving Lennie and George the benefit of the doubt, he is an unimportant character. Instead, his son Curley embodies authority on the ranch. Whereas Curley is plagued by self-doubts that cause him to explode violently, Slim possesses a quiet competence that earns him the respect of everyone on the ranch.
Like Curley, Slim stands as an authority figure. The men on the ranch look to him for advice, and, later, even Curley will deliver an uncharacteristic apology after wrongly accusing Slim of fooling around with his wife.
To avoid getting into trouble with Curley, they promise to stick even closer to each other than usual. Their friendship is rare and impressive. In the novella as a whole, Steinbeck celebrates and romanticizes the bonds between men. The men in Of Mice and Men dominate the ranch and long, more than anything else, to live peaceful, untroubled lives in the company of other men. Other female characters are mentioned in passing, but with the exception of the maternal Aunt Clara, who cared for Lennie before her death, they are invariably prostitutes or troublemakers.
Even with all of its concern for treating with dignity the lives of the socially disempowered, Of Mice and Men derogatorily assigns women only two lowly functions: caretakers of men, and sex objects. The novel altogether dismisses women from its vision of paradise, regardless of their place in the real world. George and Lennie imagine themselves alone, without wives or women to complicate their vision of tending the land and raising rabbits.
Female sexuality is ultimately described as a trap laid to ensnare and ruin men. Ace your assignments with our guide to Of Mice and Men! SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Why did Steinbeck choose the title Of Mice and Men? What happened in Weed? Why does Curley attack Lennie? Why does George kill Lennie? Why does Lennie have a dead mouse in his pocket? How is Lennie different from the other men? Why do George and Lennie travel together? Why does Curley wear a glove on one hand?
What does Slim do at the ranch? Summary Section 2. Analysis Once George and Lennie arrive at the bunkhouse, the difficulties of the lives they lead become starkly apparent. Previous section Section 1 Next section Section 3. Test your knowledge Take the Section 2 Quick Quiz. George decides that they will stay in the clearing for the night, and as they prepare their bean supper, Lennie crosses the stream and recovers the mouse, only to have George find him out immediately and take the mouse away again.
As the two men sit down to eat, Lennie asks for ketchup. He uses the incident that got them chased out of Weed as a case in point. The locals assumed he assaulted her, and ran them out of town. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. See Important Quotations Explained.
The life of a ranch-hand, according to George, is one of the loneliest in the world, and most men working on ranches have no one to look out for them. This familiar story cheers both of them up. As night falls, George tells Lennie that if he encounters any trouble while working at the ranch, he is to return to this clearing, hide in the bushes, and wait for George to come.
The clearing into which Lennie and George wander evokes Eden in its serenity and beauty. Steinbeck wisely opens the novella with this idyllic scene, for it creates a background for the idealized friendship between the men and introduces the romanticized dream of farm life that they share. The opening pages establish a sense of purity and perfection that the world, which will prove to be cruel and predatory, cannot sustain. Steinbeck also solidly establishes the relationship between George and Lennie within the first few pages of dialogue.
Their speech is that of uneducated laborers, but is emotionally rich and often lyrical. Because George and Lennie are not particularly dynamic characters neither of them changes significantly during the course of the narrative , the impression the reader gets from these early pages persists throughout the novella.
Some critics of the work consider George, and especially Lennie, somewhat flat representations of purity, goodness, and fraternal devotion, rather than convincing portraits of complex, conflicted human beings. They charge Steinbeck with being excessively sentimental in his portrayal of his protagonists, his romanticization of male friendship, and in the deterministic plot that seems designed to destroy this friendship.
Whether or not these issues constitute a flaw in the novella, it is true that Steinbeck places George, Lennie, and their relationship on a rather high pedestal. Nowhere is this more clear than in the story George constantly tells about the farm they one day plan to own. This piece of land represents a world in which the two men can live together just as they are, without dangers and without apologies.
No longer will they be run out of towns like Weed or be subject to the demeaning and backbreaking will of others. Their vision becomes so powerful that it will eventually attract other men, who will beg to be a part of it. True to the nature of tragedy, Steinbeck makes the vision of the farm so beautiful and the fraternal bond between George and Lennie so strong in order to place his protagonists at a considerable height from which to fall.
From the very beginning, Steinbeck heavily foreshadows the doom that awaits the men. The clearing into which the two travelers stumble may resemble Eden, but it is, in fact, a world with dangers lurking at every turn. Ace your assignments with our guide to Of Mice and Men!
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