Main And Secondary Characters In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

In the book Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, we can see that the main and secondary characters have oddly well-fitting relations, with events flowing together in a flawless way. The reader is not surprised and still wants to read the book. Through this essay, I will look at what the main and secondary characters implicitly mean and how their relations also further their meaning.

First, let’s take a look at George and the farm workers such as Slim. George is smart, witty and always has a plan. He is enthusiastic and a smart leader, planning to break away from the chains of being in the working class. The rest of the workers are the equivalent of what would be the middle class of the time: they are not rich, but not starving; they are seemingly

The first three would be the stereotype of the farm: the downtrodden mentally impaired bulky working man, the old swamper that has worked his whole life in the same place and not done anything else in his lifetime of fear to lose his poor status he worked so hard for, and then there is the black worker that also spent his whole life doing the same thing despite the injuries he suffered doing his work. Lennie is also a dream lower-classman, Candy the middle-classman that secretly hopes for a better future, and Crooks the pessimistic lower-classman. Those three would be the equivalent of the lower-class/middle-class factory and farm workers that could not get higher in society and their lives and legacy were deemed to stay in the same place in hierarchy. When they are in Crooks’s cabin, and everybody else has gone out to town, they fantasize about some rich life that they would never lead, and then Curley’s wife, whose name is never mentioned in the book, comes in and breaks their hopes. She is a metaphor of reality hitting them all of a sudden, making them realize they are stuck in that place in society forever. She also appears right at the moment where enthusiasm could not get any higher. This is just an example of how characters work together and how they interact, both in explicit and implicit