Sympathy In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

Your stomach feels empty, your chest hurts while breathing in, you get sad. It’s the feeling you get when you walk past homeless people, you see someone sick, someone being insulted, hurt, sad or bony, starving children in Africa on your tv screen. Sympathy. It’s one of the most human feelings, it’s part of what makes us human. In his novel ‘Of Mice and Men’, which was published in 1937, sympathy is probably one of the or maybe even the most anticipated theme. In this novel the reader accompanies the big and mentally limited Lennie and the sharp-minded George who looks out for him as they find new work on a ranch. Throughout the book the difficult relationship between Lennie and George is a big topic, as well as the increasing amount of pity and sympathy you feel for several characters of this story. Although Crooks and Curley’s wife are sympathetic characters, Lennie deserves the reader’s pity most because at the end he even gets killed for something he didn’t want to do.
Crooks deserves the reader’s sympathy because he is African American, for which he has been treated poorly his entire life. In chapter two, the way he is introduced as “the stable buck’s a n**ger”, sets a negative tone as for how the character is treated by others.(20) Although according to

The reader empathizes with him because Steinbeck’s characters say,“he ain’t mean” and sets him to be a favorable character the reader feels sorry for (41). The reader understands that Lennie doesn’t want to hurt or harm anybody but “he gets in trouble alla time because he’s so God damn dumb” and simply doesn’t understand what he’s doing wrong like the time he touched a girls dress which got both Lennie and George run out of the town (41). Finally he even gets killed to put him out of his misery by George for accidentally breaking Curley’s wife's’ neck, although all he actually wanted to do is to feel her