In Of Mice and Men Steinbeck presents a totally pessimistic view of life where dreams offer the only escape? Essay
‘Guys like all of us that work in ranches will be the loneliest folks in the world…with us this ain’t just like that…because I got you to care for me, and also you got me to look after you’.
Perhaps of Mice and Men could be perceived as a fully pessimistic expression of what life in 1930s America was like, nevertheless through the incredible relationship between George and Lennie as well as the natural dignity of Slim, a balance between the good and the awful, the cheerful and the disappointed is accomplished. The parent-child relationship distributed between George and Lennie throughout the book is certainly a positive thing. From the start with the novel, we see George as being a responsible character, a parent alternative to Lennie, whose dedication seems more through closeness than a perception of work.
He will remind Lennie that ‘(his) great aunt Clara would really like (him) jogging off by simply (himself)’ and when he can be severely triggered by Lennie to speak roughly to him, he rapidly feels responsible and apologises: ‘I recently been mean, ain’t I? ‘. Lennie, on the other hand, acts like a child, unacquainted with the struggles he and George confront throughout the new. He pleads with George to let him keep the mice he finds and needs George to replicate to him words and phrases in order to remember all of them: ‘ “Lennie…you remember the things i told you? ” Lennie elevated his arm and his confront contorted with thought’.
But although George is Lennie’s ‘opposite’, this individual continues to look after him through the novel, possibly at the end if he chooses to finish Lennie existence himself rather than watch him suffer underneath the wrath of Curley; Lennie dies with the hand with the man he trusts, continue to believing in his dream, painlessly, happy and free: ‘Lennie jarred, and then settled slowly and gradually forward to the sand, and he lay without quivering’. But most likely it is this dream which makes this novel seem thus pessimistic: it really is what apparently keeps them together yet at the end it truly is shattered, and with this, George and Lennie’s friendship comes to a shocking end.
The dream is of a really small farm, ‘ slightly place’, which they own themselves, a dream of working for themselves and of becoming the ones in control: ‘If we all don’t just like a guy we can say: “Get the hell away, ” through God he’s got to do it’. It truly is powerful enough to draw in Candy and, temporally, even the cynical Crooks.
Yet although this fantasy offers an get away from reality and even when the hope of freedom seemed possible, it is shattered and George is usually left with zero other choice but to take his one and only ally in the struggle against a contemporary society which sees it difficult to imagine than one can possibly have a friend to share his fears and sorrows with: ‘…I under no circumstances see a single guy take so much trouble for another…’ Perhaps Lennie’s death is down to fortune and future, the fact that neither this individual nor George had virtually any control over all their lives, as reflected by Slim’s sensitive words by the end of the book, ‘You hadda George. My spouse and i swear you hadda’, or even it is in fact down to the rootless American society of the 1930s.
To conclude, although George and Lennie’s friendship and Slim’s natural dignity are two good things, Lennie’s death and the collapse in the dream he and George believed in at the conclusion of the book leads person to feel that, during the Depression, freedom and success were most likely impossible to achieve. The ‘American Dream’, the key to American mindset, stated that great personal success could be gained by hard work and success. But in truth many were not allowed to achieve this achievement.
Such groups included itinerant workers and Black individuals that, in this book, are showed by Thieves, a character freely referred to as ‘nigger’, which exemplifies the everyday racism aimed towards him by the others and even though the ranch hands do not set out to insult him deliberately, the term ‘nigger’ signals to us that black males like Thieves were continuously degraded both equally verbally and physically by simply whites. The story’s heart-rending conclusion qualified prospects one to realise that for many migrant personnel, the reality of their social condition means that the ‘American Dream’ cannot be noticed.
This truth is reflected by the famous trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, both German immigrants who also realised the real force of society’s prejudice in the 1920s. Sacco and Vanzetti had been convicted from the murder of a paymaster great guard plus the robbery of $15, 776 from the Slater and Morrill Shoe stock and were later executed for their crimes. From the proof and the clear biased thoughts toward migrants, the case became one exactly where their tradition was upon trial as opposed to their actions and thus these people were bound to be seen guilty.
Instead of upholding the sacred judicial process substantiate in the United States Metabolic rate, the certainty of Sacca and Vanzetti resulted from your prejudice and discrimination of ‘old-stock’ Americans in the 1920’s. For Sacco and Vanzetti, their the time has been the time hath been not an regarding reason in American background. As “both were guilty and happily so—- of the cultural crime”: “…My certainty is that I have suffered pertaining to things My spouse and i am doing. I are suffering because I i am a major and indeed I actually am a radical; I use suffered mainly because I was an Italian, and indeed I was an Italian language; I have endured more pertaining to my family and then for my dearest than pertaining to myself; yet I am so certain to be proper that in case you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two strategy, I would live again to accomplish what I did already. ”
