Of Mice and Men

This is the great American short novel about friendship under pressure: what it costs to love someone the world wants to destroy. Steinbeck wrote it in six tight chapters, staged like a play, and every scene tightens the noose. Read it if you care about loneliness, mercy, or the gap between the life you plan and the life you get. It rewards rereading in a single sitting.

1. 1

   Act 1

   The River and the Mouse

   Evening light on the Salinas River, a few miles below Soledad. Two men drop their packs in the brush. George is 'small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features.' Lennie is 'a huge man, shapeless of face, with large, pale eyes, with wide, sloping shoulders,' who walks heavily, 'the way a bear drags his paws.' Lennie has a dead mouse in his pocket. He petted it too hard and killed it, and he cannot see the problem. George takes it and throws it into the brush; Lennie sneaks it back, and George catches him again. The pattern of their whole life together is right there: Lennie's hands do what his heart doesn't mean. George reminds him why they ran from Weed—Lennie grabbed a girl's dress to feel the soft fabric, wouldn't let go when she screamed, and a lynch mob came after them. Then comes the ritual. 'Someday—we're gonna get the jack together and we're gonna have a little house and a couple of acres an' a cow and some pigs and—' 'An' live off the fatta the lan',' Lennie shouts. 'An' have rabbits,' George adds. Before they sleep, George gives him one instruction: if trouble comes at the new ranch, hide in this brush and wait. Remember the spot. You will need it.

2. 2

   Act 2

   The Bunkhouse

   Next afternoon, the ranch in the Salinas Valley. The bunkhouse smells of lye and boots. Candy, an old swamper with one hand, shows them in and mentions the Boss was sore they arrived a day late. When the Boss questions them, George does all the talking: Lennie is his cousin, kicked in the head by a horse as a kid, dumb but a hell of a worker. Then Curley walks in—the Boss's son, short, former semi-professional boxer, a work glove filled with vaseline on his left hand. He squares up to Lennie for no reason except size. Candy explains it later: Curley hates big guys, and he married a wife who flirts with everything that moves. She proves it within the hour, posing in the bunkhouse doorway in a red cotton house dress, red mules with ostrich feathers, heavy makeup, asking where her husband is. After she leaves, George warns Lennie to stay away—'jailbait,' 'a rattrap.' Slim enters, the jerkline skinner, a tall man with 'a majesty achieved only by royalty and master craftsmen,' whose dog just had pups. Carlson proposes a trade: shoot Candy's old, stinking, blind dog, give Candy a pup. The gun is already in the room. It will be back.

3. 3

   Act 3

   The Dream Gets a Price Tag

   Night. Carlson takes the old dog outside and shoots it in the back of the head with his Luger. Candy lies on his bunk facing the wall and says nothing. He has let the men kill the one thing that was his, and the silence is the sound of an old man calculating what his own future is worth. Then he overhears George describing the farm to Lennie, and he buys in: his life savings, $350, if he can join them and cook and tend the chickens. George does the math—they can buy the place in one month. 'They fell into a silence. They looked at one another, amazed. This thing they had never really believed in was coming true.' For one evening, the dream has a down payment. Curley wrecks the arithmetic. He storms the bunkhouse hunting his wife, accuses Slim, and when Lennie smiles at the memory of the farm, Curley decides he's laughing at him and starts swinging, bloodying Lennie's face. George yells, 'Get him, Lennie!' Lennie grabs the fist and crushes it, breaking every bone. The dream survives; Curley's hand doesn't. Now the ranch has a grudge with a score to settle.

4. 4

   Act 4

   Crooks's Room

   Saturday night, the men go to town, and Lennie wanders to the harness room where Crooks lives alone—the black stable hand with a crooked back, kept apart from the white workers. Crooks snaps at him first: 'You got no right to come in my room. This here's my room. Nobody got any right in here but me.' But Lennie's simple company wears him down, and he says the truest sentence in the book: 'A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. Don't make no difference who the guy is, long's he's with you. I tell ya, I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick.' Candy joins them and mentions the farm. Crooks scoffs—then cracks. 'If you guys would want a hand to work for nothing—just his keep, why I'd come an' lend a hand.' Three men and a dream, and even the man who's seen a hundred dreamers die wants in. Curley's wife appears, calls them 'a bunch of bindle stiffs,' and when Crooks tells her to leave, she reminds him what she is: 'You know what I can do to you if you open your trap? I could get you strung up on a tree so easy it ain't even funny.' Crooks pulls back inside himself. The dream was never going to include him, and she makes sure he knows it.

5. 5

   Act 5

   The Barn

   Sunday afternoon. Lennie sits alone in the barn with a dead puppy—he stroked it too hard. 'Why do you got to get killed? You ain't so little as mice. I didn't bounce you hard,' he tells it, grieving and already afraid of what this means for the rabbits. Curley's wife finds him there. She talks, really talks, for the first time: she could have been in movies, a man she met at the Riverside Dance Palace promised to write to Hollywood and never did, and she married Curley because she was lonely. Two lonely people in a barn full of hay. She learns about the mice and the soft things, and she offers her hair. He strokes it too hard. She panics and screams. Lennie covers her mouth and shakes her, and her neck breaks. 'And then she was still, for Lennie had broken her neck.' Candy finds the body and fetches George. George takes Carlson's Luger and sends the men south on a false trail, because he knows exactly where Lennie has gone—the brush by the river, the spot he drilled into him the first night. Curley organizes the mob and says he wants to shoot Lennie in the gut.

6. 6

   Act 6

   The Brush by the River

   Lennie reaches the brush, right where George told him to go. His mind breaks open: his dead Aunt Clara scolds him, and a giant rabbit tells him George will leave him. Then George arrives, and Lennie asks for the story—the little house, the couple of acres, the rabbits. George tells it one last time, knowing what it costs. As Lennie stares across the river, George raises Carlson's Luger and shoots him in the back of the head. 'The hand shook violently, but his face set and his hand steadied. He pulled the trigger.' Slim, Curley, and Carlson arrive seconds later. Slim understands: 'You hadda, George. I swear you hadda,' and he leads George away. Carlson gets the last line of the book, and it's the loneliest: 'Now what the hell ya suppose is eatin' them two guys?' The heron is back in the shallows, swallowing a water snake while its tail waved frantically. The same river, the same birds, the same world that never noticed either man.

• GGeorge MiltonSmall, quick, sharp-featured; Lennie's guardian and only friend since childhood. He carries the dream of a farm for both of them, and in the end he carries the gun that ends it.
• LLennie SmallA huge, strong man with a child's mind who loves soft things and kills them without meaning to. His dream is simply to tend the rabbits, and his own strength is what takes it away.
• CCandyThe old swamper with one hand, who let Carlson shoot his ancient dog and never forgave himself. He puts his $350 life savings into the farm, buying a future just in time to watch it die.
• CCurleyThe Boss's short, aggressive son, a former semi-professional boxer with a vaseline-filled glove. He picks a fight with Lennie, loses a crushed hand, and leads the mob at the end.
• CCurley's wifeThe only woman on the ranch, unnamed, flirtatious, and desperately lonely; she once dreamed of the movies. She finds her one real conversation in the barn, and it kills her.
• SSlimThe jerkline skinner with 'a majesty achieved only by royalty and master craftsmen,' the one man everyone respects. He alone understands what George did at the river and why.
• CCrooksThe black stable hand with a crooked back, isolated in the harness room. He knows dreams fail—he's watched men try for years—yet still asks to hoe a garden patch on the farm, then is threatened back into his place.
• CCarlsonThe thick-bodied ranch hand who shoots Candy's dog with his Luger and can't understand grief. His gun and his blindness bookend the ending.
• TThe BossCurley's father, superintendent of a ranch owned by a big land company. Suspicious of men who travel together and answer questions in one voice.
• AAunt ClaraThe woman who raised Lennie and left George to look after him. She returns only as a hallucination, scolding Lennie in his last hour.

The dead mouse

The heron and the water snake

Candy's dog

Carlson's Luger

Soledad

The ending is deliberately unbearable because it is also a mercy. George shoots Lennie with the same gun, the same method, used on Candy's dog—Steinbeck has spent the whole book teaching you what that means, so you can't call it murder and can't call it anything else either. One reading: George's final act is the only free choice anyone makes in the book, love expressed as a quick death instead of Curley's gut-shot and a lynch rope. Another reading: George kills the dream, not just the man—Lennie was the only thing keeping the farm alive, and George shooting him is the dream admitting it was always a story. The hallucinations of Aunt Clara and the giant rabbit suggest Lennie's own mind delivers the verdict before George does. What makes it land is Slim's 'You hadda' against Carlson's 'what the hell ya suppose is eatin' them two guys?'—the book ends on the gap between the one man who understands and the world that never will.

1. 1.Is George's shooting of Lennie an act of love, an act of despair, or both—and does Slim's 'You hadda' settle the question or dodge it?
2. 2.Compare the two shootings: Carlson killing Candy's dog and George killing Lennie. What does Candy's regret ('I should have done it myself') predict about George's choice?
3. 3.Curley's wife is never given a name. Does Steinbeck's treatment of her—flirtatious danger in the bunkhouse, lonely failed movie star in the barn—make her a full character or a plot device, and does the book know the difference?

Anyone who has ever been responsible for someone fragile, or been the fragile one. It's the essential short novel for readers who want maximum emotional damage in a single afternoon.

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