đź“š: Of mice and men

⚠️ Warning: Spoilers

I found Steinbeck’s 1937 novella outstanding, well worth the few hours it demands. So much happens so quickly! The ending doesn’t disappoint.

This is a story about friendship and the bravery George finds, to kill his only friend.

It’s also a story about a cruel world. Everybody is fundamentally lonely. They have to believe their own fictions and broken dreams in order to keep going (we’re going to live of the fatta lan’, I could have been in the pitchers, etc.). This is a world that just gets rid of the weak. Perhaps the clearest expression of this is the story of Candy, who expects to get the same treatment as his dog.

The story takes us through a series of killings, of pets and two humans, and asks us to examine how we should feel about them, at least three of them —the humans and the old dog.

The story provides a compelling depiction of how innocent people —Lennie— can, in fear and confusion, unintentionally kill others, even others who are very dear to them (the puppy).

When the victim is a person, we see the expected angry reactions, but we know the unjustifiable act was somewhat unintentional, an escalation of previous acts.

George killing Lennie is the central act. After confirming that there really is no alternative, George kills Lennie out of kindness, in order to save him from getting lynched. The killing of Candy’s old dog —and, before that, Slim’s four pups— sets the stage, without us knowing.

There’s a significant difference between Lennie’s death and the old dog’s: Candy was unable to kill his faithful dog —and even expresses regret about this to George. This enables George to understand, when Lennie escapes, that he should not leave Lennie’s luck in the hands of others. He find the strength to comfort Lennie as he readies to pull the trigger himself, with trembling hands.

I really liked the simplicity of the story, the plain, direct, language, the absence of sentence-level intellectual puzzles and (sentence-level) ambiguity. The focus is on the deeper layers.

I also really liked how, as I mentioned, the initial deaths set the stage for the main act. This is done incredibly well —I only noticed some of these rhymes once I put the book down. As a result, the book says a lot about its main topic before you notice what the main topic is, and thus manages to express a lot with an incredible economy of pages.

I found the characters mostly convincing, but there are exceptions: Curley’s wife’s barn monologue and Crooks’s in his room. They talk about main themes in the story —our broken dreams and how the lonely go mad— but they felt forced. This probably reflects that this is a play-novelette.

I guess I would have done away with the phonetic spelling of dialect in the dialogue —write “family” and “pictures” instead of “fambly” and “pitchers”. Flowers for Algernon gains a lot from this literary device, but here I found it just distracting.

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