This is my reflection on Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck. Spoilers ahead.
“I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s why.”
-George and Lennie
Hope.
There is immense power in hope. It’s a power that can sustain characters through the miseries of their circumstances and the misfortunes of their existence. We get a striking glimpse of this hope in George and Lennie, two wandering workers in America in the 1930’s. They share a dream, as wanderers do, of holding a place to call their own. George is sharp, focused, and cynical while Lennie is large, sluggish, and hopelessly foolish. But through their differences, they are bound together through that shared dream. George wants a house to call his own. He wants a garden to harvest his crops and cows to butcher his own meat. Essentially, he wants what all wandering workers wanted during this tumultuous time in America: property and capital. Lennie’s a simple man: all he wants are rabbits to pet and tend to. But, as they end up working on a ranch in the Salinas Valley to save up money, their best plans start to go awry.
Lennie is a gentle giant, but unaware of his raw strength. Lennie kills both mice and puppies while petting them. In his first week there, Curley, the son’s boss, gets intimidated by Lennie’s size and attacks him, only to have his hands broken. But, through Lennie’s poor memory and lack of judgement, George stays by his and side takes care of him. Near the end of the novel, Curley’s wife approaches Lennie, Lennie grabs her hair, she screams, he tightens his grip, snaps her neck, and then runs away. Curley, already furious from his broken hands, takes a group of farmhands to search for and lynch Lennie. George manages to find him first. Lennie’s hiding in the woods, terrified and ashamed. He’s relieved that he found George, and he can’t wait to run away to get a house for themselves. George tells him turn around and George starts to talk about the farm, the house, and all the rabbits that Lennie is going to be tending. Lennie smiles, with the light of hope in his eyes and… well Steinbeck puts it better than I ever could.
“And George raised the gun and steadied it, and he brought the muzzle of it close to the back of Lennie’s head. The hand shook violently, but his face set and his hand steadied. He pulled the trigger. The crash of the shot rolled up the hills and rolled down again. Lennie jarred, and then settled slowly forward to the sand, and he lay without quivering.”
This ending rocked me to my core. I’m not sure what impacted me the most: the innocence of the murderer, the inability for Lennie to turn his dream into reality, or the pure unselfish mercy when George took the guilt of killing his best friend to save him from the ruthlessness of Curly’s mob. Of Mice and Men is no fairy tale. It shows the reality of the discouraged and impoverished worker in a raw and intimate way, one that I haven’t seen in a while. This novel is a testament to humanity and friendship, even in the most despondent of circumstances.
But, even still, I can’t get over that final scene. Because more than anything, Of Mice and Men shows mercy unlike anything I’ve seen before. Just like an owner putting his dog down, George shoots his best friend in the back of the head to spare him from the inevitable pain. That’s mercy so intense that I’m still don’t know whether George is good or evil, but maybe that’s the whole point.
The book for the next week is The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.