The Spiteful Nature of Human beings
Of Mice and Men teaches a sad lesson about the nature of human nature. Nearly all of the characters, including George, Lennie, Candy, Crooks, and Curley’s wife, admit, at one time or another, to having a powerful sense of loneliness and isolation. Each desires the comfort of a friend, but will settle for a stranger that will listen. Curley’s wife tells Candy, Crooks, and Lennie that she is unhappily married, and Crooks tells Lennie that life is no good without a friend to talk to. The characters are made helpless by their isolation, and yet, even at their weakest, they seek to hurt those who are even weaker than they are. Perhaps the most powerful example of this cruel habit is when Crooks criticizes Lennie’s dream of the farm and his dependence on George. Having just admitted his own weakness—he is a black man with a crooked back who longs for companionship—Crooks focuses on Lennie’s own weaknesses.
In scenes such as this one, Steinbeck show a truth about people: oppression does not come only from the hands of the strong or the powerful. Crooks seems at his strongest when he has nearly reduced Lennie to tears for fear that something bad has happened to George, just as Curley’s wife feels most powerful when she threatens to have Crooks killed. The novel suggests that the strength that used to oppress others is caused by weakness.
Brotherhood and Male Friendship
One of the reasons that the tragic end of George and Lennie’s friendship has such a strong impact is that it feels like the friends have lost a dream larger than themselves. The farm on which George and Lennie plan to live—a place that no one ever reaches—has a magnetic quality. After hearing a description of only a few sentences, Candy is completely drawn in by its magic. Crooks has witnessed countless men fall under the same spell, and still he cannot help but ask Lennie if he can have a patch of garden to hoe there. The men in Of Mice and Men desire to come together in a way that would allow them to be like brothers to one another. They want to live with one another’s best interests in mind, to protect each other, and to know that there is someone in the world dedicated to protecting them.
The Impossibility of the American Dream
Most of the characters in Of Mice and Men dream of a better life: before her death, Curley’s wife confesses her desire to be a movie star; Crooks, bitter as he is, allows himself the pleasant fantasy of hoeing a patch of garden on Lennie’s farm one day; and Candy latches on desperately to George’s vision of owning a couple of acres. What makes all of these dreams typically American is that the dreamers wish for perfect happiness, for the freedom to follow their own desires. George and Lennie’s dream of owning a farm, which would enable them to sustain themselves, and, most important, offer them protection from an inhospitable world, represents a prototypically American ideal. Their journey, which awakens George to the impossibility of this dream, sadly proves that the bitter Crooks is right: such paradises of freedom, contentment, and safety are not to be found in this world.
