Of Mice and Men
With a simple plot and theatrical structure, it tells the story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two-day laborers who go from ranch to ranch in California during the Great Depression looking for work. George is smart and suspicious; Lennie is strong and good-natured, but without an ounce of intelligence. They both dream of buying a piece of land and setting up a rabbit farm; but there is an air of tragedy throughout the novel that presages the inevitable. Told in quick strokes and bluntly (except for a few expendable descriptions), it is a touching and subtle novel, with a technique as admirable as it is invisible. In this way, an emotional and friendly story is presented to us with lonely characters who find themselves in a harsh world and in which it can be seen that misfortune is imminent.
The book is tough. To the treatment of social differences, Steinbeck adds other issues such as racism or old age. His habitual pessimism does not leave many doors open to hope. Lennie and George live in a utopia: to have their own farm one day. But it happens to them like Lennie with those animals he caresses: whether it’s a mouse or a dog, he touches and hugs them so much that in the end he kills them. Such is the cruel fate with human frailty. With words it comes to say that man is little more than an animal. Given such a scenario, friendship seems to be the only thing capable of making things more bearable. This book is read in schools in the United States, although it has been censored several times due to its subject matter and vocabulary. Personally, I think that censoring these types of books would be a mistake, since it would be like hiding a part of us. This author perfectly reflects how things were at that time and is therefore an exceptional historical source.
Of Mice and Men is a short book. In addition, the way in which the author tells the story, few details and many dialogues, makes it very easy to read and catches you little by little. The only complaint I have about this novel is that, apart from Lennie and George, we don’t really know the other characters at all, since the author introduces them briefly and with small brushstrokes through the dialogues between them. Despite being a short book, it has many symbolic elements in which the situation that was generally experienced by workers in rural areas in the years of the Great Depression is reflected.
The consequences caused by the chaos and the economic repercussion of the fall of the American financial markets had a devastating effect on the society of the time; many families had to change their way of life since they lost their savings and their sources of income, they also had to settle for sporadic and poorly paid jobs. One of the sectors where the economic decline was most noticeable was the rural community, since planting, harvesting and animal husbandry were reduced to a minimum, so there were losses of investment and jobs, often this situation forced landowners to sell their properties at a very low price.
John Steinbeck shows us a cruel world where a critique of capitalism can be glimpsed without hardly being noticed, as in other of his works. That ideal of a certain humanism is very present in Of Mice and Men. However, despite the cruelty, the rudeness, there is an underlying message in all of John Steinbeck’s work that conveys a certain breath of hope, a positive message even when the ending is dramatic, and that is that John Steinbeck, like Camus had faith in humanity. And that is something that is noticeable in the narrative pulse that the author transmits with his simple, direct, unadorned prose, through a story that, like many of his, has the ability to move the reader. Of Mice and Men has that atmosphere of loneliness, misery and despair in which the plot unfolds, while offering us profound characters. In George’s words we can summarize the life of the day laborers in this way: “Guys like us that work on ranches are the loneliest guys in the world. They ain’t got no family and they don’t belong no place…” John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” is the kind of book that initially gives you hope, sustains it for a while, and then shatters it by exposing the true character of men and the world we live in.
Of Mice and Men
With a simple plot and theatrical structure, it tells the story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two-day laborers who go from ranch to ranch in California during the Great Depression looking for work. George is smart and suspicious; Lennie is strong and good-natured, but without an ounce of intelligence. They both dream of buying a piece of land and setting up a rabbit farm; but there is an air of tragedy throughout the novel that presages the inevitable. Told in quick strokes and bluntly (except for a few expendable descriptions), it is a touching and subtle novel, with a technique as admirable as it is invisible. In this way, an emotional and friendly story is presented to us with lonely characters who find themselves in a harsh world and in which it can be seen that misfortune is imminent.
The book is tough. To the treatment of social differences, Steinbeck adds other issues such as racism or old age. His habitual pessimism does not leave many doors open to hope. Lennie and George live in a utopia: to have their own farm one day. But it happens to them like Lennie with those animals he caresses: whether it’s a mouse or a dog, he touches and hugs them so much that in the end he kills them. Such is the cruel fate with human frailty. With words it comes to say that man is little more than an animal. Given such a scenario, friendship seems to be the only thing capable of making things more bearable. This book is read in schools in the United States, although it has been censored several times due to its subject matter and vocabulary. Personally, I think that censoring these types of books would be a mistake, since it would be like hiding a part of us. This author perfectly reflects how things were at that time and is therefore an exceptional historical source.
Of Mice and Men is a short book. In addition, the way in which the author tells the story, few details and many dialogues, makes it very easy to read and catches you little by little. The only complaint I have about this novel is that, apart from Lennie and George, we don’t really know the other characters at all, since the author introduces them briefly and with small brushstrokes through the dialogues between them. Despite being a short book, it has many symbolic elements in which the situation that was generally experienced by workers in rural areas in the years of the Great Depression is reflected.
The consequences caused by the chaos and the economic repercussion of the fall of the American financial markets had a devastating effect on the society of the time; many families had to change their way of life since they lost their savings and their sources of income, they also had to settle for sporadic and poorly paid jobs. One of the sectors where the economic decline was most noticeable was the rural community, since planting, harvesting and animal husbandry were reduced to a minimum, so there were losses of investment and jobs, often this situation forced landowners to sell their properties at a very low price.
John Steinbeck shows us a cruel world where a critique of capitalism can be glimpsed without hardly being noticed, as in other of his works. That ideal of a certain humanism is very present in Of Mice and Men. However, despite the cruelty, the rudeness, there is an underlying message in all of John Steinbeck’s work that conveys a certain breath of hope, a positive message even when the ending is dramatic, and that is that John Steinbeck, like Camus had faith in humanity. And that is something that is noticeable in the narrative pulse that the author transmits with his simple, direct, unadorned prose, through a story that, like many of his, has the ability to move the reader. Of Mice and Men has that atmosphere of loneliness, misery and despair in which the plot unfolds, while offering us profound characters. In George’s words we can summarize the life of the day laborers in this way: “Guys like us that work on ranches are the loneliest guys in the world. They ain’t got no family and they don’t belong no place…” John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” is the kind of book that initially gives you hope, sustains it for a while, and then shatters it by exposing the true character of men and the world we live in.