Of Mice and Men

You would think that I'd have been all over this given my enthusiasm for Steinbeck a few years ago, but this was my first real encounter with the book since I was a sophomore in high school, and Andy Bernea and I did a cutting for our Drama 1 class. I was George and he was Lenny, and he got a standing ovation from the class for his performance. I was along for the ride.

The book is so fucking bleak. As Sara said, you know it's going to turn out badly, but it makes Grapes of Wrath seem like a comedy. And there is a lot that seems unrealistic about the story, even though it is considered a story of realism. Mainly, Lenny. Given his behavior around the puppy and the ease with which he crushed Curley's hand and killed Curley's wife, it's hard to imagine that he would have made it as far as his did without being locked up. Sara pegged him as psychotic, especially when he threw the dead puppy around, and it just doesn't seem real that he had not been incarcerated or killed before then. Interesting that Steinbeck says that he worked with Lennie and watched the real "Lennie" kill the ranch foreman with a pitchfork.

Curley and his wife don't seem all that plausible to me, but maybe that's a product of the times that I grew up in. For Curley to go around trying to pick a fight with the ranch hands, or then to insist that he was going to gut-shot Lenny when he found him just doesn't ring true with me. The code of the west comes to the Depression?

Candy and Crooks provide enough pathos throughout the book to keep it depressing. Both of them are in dead ends with their lives with nothing to look forward to after being essentially destroyed by their jobs. Candy seems as simple as Lennie much of the time, and his hopes are of course shattered when Lennie dies. Crooks almost buys into the dream of a house and a farm, but pulls back in refusing to hope for something better.

I find it hard to believe that this has been taught in American lit for so many years. I wouldn't even begin to know how to approach it with kids who have so little background knowledge. Maybe it's a fit with depression era literature, but it seems that there must be better stuff out there. And if I were going to teach a short Steinbeck novel, I'd go for Cannery Row over Mice and Men.

Author: Steinbeck, John

Date Published: 1937

Length: 4 hr

Narrator: Hammer, Mark