Of Mice and Men Section: Book Reports
When Lennie wandered into his room, Crooks talked to Lennie about his loneliness. He described how upsetting it was to not be able to share your thoughts with another person. "A guy sets alone out here at night, maybe readin' books or thinkin' or stuff like that." Crooks explained, "Sometimes he gets thinkin', an' he got nothin to tell him what's so an' what ain't so. Maybe he sees somethin', he don't know whether it's right or not. He can't turn to some other guy an' ask him if he sees it too. He can't tell" (80). Crooks also tried to get Lennie to sympathize with his loneliness. "S'pose you didn't have nobody. S'pose you couldn't go into the bunk house and play rummy 'cause you was black. How'd you like that? Sure you could play horseshoes till it got dark, but then you got to read books. Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. Don't make no difference who the guy is, long's he with you" (80). The loneliness that Crooks had to face turned him into a very sad man. Crooks last point about it not mattering who the guy is, was illustrated perfectly in his conversation with Lennie. Lennie hardly listened to a word Crooks said, but because of his loneliness Crooks talked anyway. Just talking to another human being briefly comforted his pain with being alone. Another character who experiences loneliness in the story is Curley's wife. Steinbeck chose not to even give her a name, just to emphasize how isolated and lonely she was. She was unhappily married to Curley, with who she never even spent time with. Because of this, she wandered through the ranch talking to the workers to avoid her loneliness. At one point she addresses Crooks, Lennie, and Candy. "Think I don't like to talk to somebody ever' once in a while? Think I like to sit in that house alla time" (80)? Her habit of talkin to the ranch hands to avoid loneliness, eventually ended in her death. She approached Lennie for conversation, and it ended in Lennie killing her in his panicked state. If she hadn't have had all the loneliness, she probably wouldn't have talked to Lennie at all. In Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck showed the toll that loneliness takes on people and how they try to avoid loneliness. He used George and Lennie's relationship as a contrast to everyone else in the novel who went through life alone. He also showed the downside of out casting people like Crooks and Candy, for race and age, because the loneliness they would be left with was cruel. With Curley's wife, Steinbeck showed just how hurtful loneliness can be by havin her own loneliness result in her death. After understanding the effects of loneliness by reading the novel, Steinbeck leaves the reader wondering whether Curley's wife was better off dead anyway.
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