Relationships In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

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Relationships In “Of Mice and Men” Relationships are the essential “backbone” of John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men, the most prominent being that of George Milton and Lennie Small. We learn early on that these two men are not related but rather are brought together by Lennie’s aunt Clara when she passes and George agrees to take care of Lennie. What is surprising about this pairing however, is not that they are not bonded by blood but rather that they are bonded at all in the time period of the depression. George however, lets us know pretty early on that this relationship hasn’t always been as fair as they make it out to be. George even says that back before Lennie almost drowned that he would “play jokes on ‘im ‘cause he was too dumb …show more content…

During this time families fell into a constant spiral of moving and shuffling around the countryside trying to find a place that they could hold a job to support their family (“ Life During the Great Depression). Not everyone had a family however. Like George and Lennie, there were many young men that left everything that they had known of a family even before the depression hit and just moved around finding jobs on ranches and shuffling between new people for a small paycheck at the end of the month. Many say that this was the strongest evidence that George and Lennie had a different bond than most men expected, I argue however that the most shocking part of their relationship revolves around Lennie’s …show more content…

After finding Curly’s wife George and Candy both knew that Lennie had done the job and that he would have to go either locked away forever or gone forever. Once they had discovered this Candy looks at George and hesitantly says “You an’ me can get that little place can’t we George? You an’ me can go live on that place can’t we George? Can’t we?” From this quote it’s easy to see that Candy had already understood that this was not possible. At the end of the book there is a very discomforting way of writing that foreshadows that something bad is about to happen. Most readers expect that Lennie is going to be killed by Curly or one of his men on their man hunt, what we don’t expect is that George gets ahead of the group and does it

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