Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. 1937. Penguin, 2002.

Summary of Work
George and Lennie are sitting in the brush by a small pool in the evening light. A bus driver dropped them off too many miles away from the ranch they were headed to, and so George decides they will stop and spend the night by the pool. Lennie is mentally retarded, a big burly man with the mind of a small child. He has a mouse in his pocket which he has killed and is petting, and George makes him throw it away. They have been run out of town because Lennie wouldn’t let go of a woman’s dress, and she said he raped her. They had to hide in order to save Lennie’s life. George tells Lennie that he isn’t to do any talking when they get to the new ranch and he isn’t to do anything bad again so they can get their money for a month’s work and go head out to get their dream land, where Lennie can help raise rabbits and they can put up their own crop. He tells him that if anything bad happens, Lennie is to go back to this spot and to hide until George came for him.

When they get to the ranch, the ranch hand gets them set up and the ranch owner tells them they’ll start putting up grain in the evening since they missed going out in the morning. Then Curley, the rancher’s son, comes in and is looking for his wife. He sees Lennie and gets upset that he won’t answer him when he speaks, and George defends him, but Curley is upset and then gone. Candy, an old man with an old sheep dog, tells them that Curley was one of the best welter weight fighters in the area and he’s always looking for a fight. And George tells Lennie to steer clear of him. Then, when the men come in, they meet Seth, who is the head thresher and one of the main ranch hands. They get talking, and they learn that Seth’s dog has had puppies. He had to drown four of the nine because the mother couldn’t take care of all of them. Lennie gets excited about puppies, and Seth lets him have one. He is always in petting the puppies and picking them up, and he has to be told to put his back with its mother so it doesn’t die.

Seth talks to George about Lennie and learns about his condition and what he’s done in the past. George knew Lennie from childhood through Lennie’s Aunt Clara, and had always taken care of him after her passing, even though at first he was always playing jokes and being mean to Lennie because Lennie couldn’t tell what was going on. Seth respects George. That evening, when Candy and his dog come in, Carlson, another ranch hand, tells Candy that he needs to shoot his old dog and he can get a puppy from Seth. Seth says that he can, and not seeing any way that the dog won’t be shot, he lets Carlson take the old dog outside and shoot him. He is devastated, but doesn’t let anyone see.

Throughout the day, Curley’s wife has come in “looking for Curley,” but is in fact looking for men to talk to and flirt with. All the ranch hands know she’s trouble. Curley comes in after Seth has left to tar a broken shoe on a mule, and asks where his wife is. He thinks Seth is with her, so he goes out to get him, and the other men, minus Lennie, George, and Candy, follow. George and Lennie aren’t aware Candy hasn’t left, and they start talking about their dream land. Candy asks if it is real, and offers to front over half the money to get the land. They let Candy in on the scheme, and they plan to finish the month out and then write to the owners of the land for purchase. Curley comes back with Seth, upset that Seth got the better of him, and he sees Lennie smiling and attacks him. George tells him to get him, and Lennie, after being beaten in the face and then the stomach, grabs Curley’s left hand and crushes all the bones in it. Seth tells Curley that he will take him to the doctor, but he is not to get Lennie fired.

One evening George goes to town with the men to the whore house, and he leaves Lennie at the ranch. Lennie first went to go pet the dogs but was told that he couldn’t keep doing that or they’d die. So he goes into the one black man on the ranch’s home, a man by the name of Crooks. Crooks at first is upset he is in there, but then gets talking about his situation. Lennie can’t let up about talking about the ranch and rabbits, and Crooks asks Lennie to suppose that George never came back, that George died or left. This upsets Lennie to the point where he goes to attack Crooks, but Crooks is able to calm him down. Then Candy comes in and they start talking more about the ranch and the rabbits. When Crooks realizes they are serious, he says he’d love to just be able to come work there if he could just live on the land. Then Curley’s wife walks in, and after horning in for so long, Crooks tells her she’s not wanted. But she gets upset and tells him that she has power over him, that she can get him lynched on a single word. It cows him into submission, and when Candy speaks up to say that they’d stop her, she tells him that no one would believe him either. She sees that Lennie has never stopped looking at her, and she talks a little bit to him about how she knows he is the one that hurt Curley and then leaves. George comes home and tells them to get out of Crooks’ cabin.

Then one afternoon, Lennie goes in to play with his puppy and kills it because it bit him and he threw it to the ground. He is upset because he believes that now he will not get to tend to any rabbits. He contemplates hiding the dog or telling George he was already dead when he went to see him, but knows George will know the truth. Then Curley’s wife comes in and starts talking to him, and she talks to him about the dead puppy and why he killed it. He says it was an accident and that he just likes to pet soft things. He tells her about the ranch and the rabbits as well. Then he talks about how his Aunt Clara got him a piece of red velvet and he wishes he still had it, it was so soft. She lets him touch her hair, and he keeps petting it, more and more violently, until she gets scared and tells him to stop. This scares him, and he grabs ahold of her hair and won’t let go. When she starts to scream, he covers her mouth and then starts to shake her, breaking her neck. He panics, covers her partially with hay, takes the dead dog, and runs and hides in the spot that George told him to.

Candy comes in soon after—all the men had been playing horseshoes—and finds the dead woman. He calls in George, and George says that they’ll have to either kill him or put him in jail this time, and there’s no way around it. George has Candy go get the other men and George acts like he is seeing the body for the first time as well, and Curley goes to get his shotgun to kill Lennie. Carlson also goes to get his pistol, but cannot find it. They figure Lennie has taken it. They all go out to find him, and George goes to the pond and finds Lennie there. They talk, with Lennie thinking George is mad at him, and George comforts Lennie by telling him the story of the ranch. He has him look out at the horizon so he can picture the ranch out there, and while Lennie is looking out, George takes out Carlson’s pistol and shoots him in the head, severing the spine at the neck. Then he throws the gun away. The other men come in on the scene and see him dead, and Seth walks away with George, saddened. Curley and Carlson don’t understand why George and Seth are sad.

Brief Note on Themes
Friendship and brotherhood, male bonds, are the main theme throughout this work. The main bond is Lennie and George, where George is both caretaker and friend, if not essentially a brother, to the mentally retarded Lennie. Seth and George and Candy and George also have bonds of fellowship, with Seth being the boss that is a leader and friend, and Candy being another ward of George’s. The various types of masculinity are embodied in these men: George is a strong family man; Seth is the cool and calm, but strong, leader; Curley is the fighter who embodies traditional ideas of masculinity, as is Carlson; Candy is the kind-hearted man, as is Lennie.

The American Dream, particularly the dream of land ownership in the American West, runs throughout the book. Lower-class economic life in the West is another topic that runs through this work, with the men always dreaming of saving enough money to buy land but never able to work out of their situation as it stands. The American West, always seen as wild, untamed, a place for a man to make his mark, is seen as much more domesticated, but still untamed enough for space to grow and cultivate a new life.

Race relations also feature as a theme in this book, with Crooks being the only black man on the ranch or anywhere around for miles and miles. He knows his place among white men is considered lesser, and it makes him bitter and isolated. He has been worked so hard he is arthritic and has a bad back. Those race relations are even more prominent when Curley’s wife comes in and threatens lynching when he tells her to get away from all the men.

Morality and justifiable murder are also themes, with Carlson first killing Candy’s dog because the dog is old and decrepit, and then George killing Lennie the exact same way because Lennie killed Curley’s wife. Questions arise about accountability and life: Should animals be killed simply because they are old? Should mentally retarded men who commit a crime they cannot mentally understand or be responsible for be murdered in kind for those crimes? What other ways of discipline are there, and can different modes be applied to different people according to their mental capacity?