John Steinbeck: Mice and men - Essay Example

K. Someday – we’re gonna get the jack together and we’re gonna have a little house and a couple of acres an’ a cow and some pigs (7). He also tells Lennie, “We’d just live there…We belong there…There wouldn’t be no more running’ around the country” (23). George’s dream seems like the perfect American Dream, the one where someone would desire a land of his own and some property such as animals and most of all, peace and quiet – which are the very things that both he and Lennie do not have as of the moment.

Nevertheless, he somehow tries to keep repeating these dreams to himself and to Lennie perhaps in order to counter his own doubts. Deep within him, George may be feeling as if he would not be able to achieve these dreams, or at least not with Lennie. He then shoots Lennie at the end of the story, perhaps because he thinks that this is the only way for him to be able to pursue his dreams. However, although the story does not say, George might get arrested for the murder if Curley and his friends told the police.

Overall, through George’s example, the author is trying to tell the readers the impossibility of the American Dream, and that perhaps people such as George simply use such dreams only to compensate for their own seemingly hopeless existence. Lennie’s dream is to just follow whatever George tells him. When George says they would have two acres of land with cows and pigs, Lennie concludes it by saying “An’ live off the fatta the lan’” (7). The “fat of the land” that Lennie is talking about implies the idea of abundance, just like the biblical land flowing with milk and honey.

Although it is a mere metaphor, such abundance is the one thing that dominates Lennie’s childlike mentality and fervor. Nevertheless, no amount of positive thinking would ever be able to challenge the reality that confronts him and George. Lennie is admittedly a big, clumsy guy who easily kills anything weaker than him. At the end of the story he unintentionally kills Curley’s wife by breaking his neck as he covers her mouth. This ends up with him and George running away from Curley’s men, and George finally shooting him in the back of his head.

George shoots him for he knows either Curley’s men would kill Lennie or worse, they would have him arrested. In any case, as long as he is alive, Lennie would always have a difficult life and George would never be able to have the peace and quiet that he desires for he believes himself to be responsible for whatever Lennie does. Thus, Lennie’s dream of the fat of the land ends up with a bullet in his head. The author is, therefore, once again telling the readers that the American Dream is nothing but some childish, tragic, suicidal thought.

Crooks, the negro stable buck, dreams of going back to the wonderful childhood he had in California. He says, “My old man had a chicken ranch, ‘bout ten acres…the white kids come to play at our place, an’ sometimes I went to play with them, and some of them was pretty nice (35). He also says they had a strawberry patch, an alfalfa patch and the chickens (36). Crooks dream, although he does not say it directly, is nothing but a life of abundance, with enough plants and animals for food, and with his family taking care of him. He also