Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

One of my favorite classics of all time is Of Mice and Men, but I haven't read it since high school. I remember finishing this book way ahead of my assignment due dates because I couldn't put it down. I finished it during gym class (our teacher was out sick and we were just sitting in the bleachers that period), and I was completely devastated. It was one of those heart-pounding, truly moving reading experiences. Thinking back, this was one of the first books that got me interested in classic literature. When I was putting together my Then Vs. Now Challenge list, I knew that I had to revisit this one and see if I still felt the same was about it now as I did when I was 15. 

The plot of this novel centers around George Milton and Lennie Small, two drifters traveling together around California looking for work. Their goal is to save enough money to get their own place one day and live off of their own land. However, they struggle to work one job long enough to save anything. Lennie has an intellectual disability and operates at the mental level of a small child. This, coupled with his large frame and prodigious strength leads the pair into a lot of trouble. Lennie is an innocent with a heart of gold, but he continually gets himself into bad situations due to his lack of understanding of social rules. George does the best he can to teach him how to act and protect him from the cruelty of others, but his effectiveness is limited. The pair continually has to flee to new towns for fresh starts. 

As the story begins, George and Lennie are about to start a new job harvesting barley on a ranch. They are hoping that this will finally be the situation that works out - that this will finally be the job they can stay on long enough to put together enough cash to buy their own land. They even find another person to help them with a deposit, an old worker named Candy, who lost a hand working the ranch years ago and is worried about losing his job as a result. They only need to last another month to get their funds together, but their goals are complicated by another man named Curley. Curley is the son of the ranch owner, and has an extremely aggressive temperament. His new wife is also troublesome, as she constantly flirts with the other workers behind Curley's back. Both of these characters clash with Lennie in disastrous ways, leaving George with some difficult decisions to make in order to keep his friend safe.

This story is absolutely gut-wrenching and it hit me hard reading it for a second time. I believe that reading it as an adult is a much more emotional experience than reading it as a teenager. Having been responsible for students as a teacher and having experienced married life gave me a whole new level of connection to the text, and I was actually sobbing as I finished the story this time around. Steinbeck's writing is simple in this short novel, but he manages to tell an extremely thoughtful and heartfelt story about friendship, kindness, responsibility, and the casual cruelty of strangers.

I found myself thinking a lot about power while reading this novel, and how people choose to exercise it over others. Many of the characters use their power in cruel ways, designed to serve some broken part of themselves. Curley uses his status as the son of the ranch owner and his physical abilities as a fighter to constantly harass and threaten the men working below him. He is a short man and a weak man and he wants to feel big. His wife uses the power of her sexuality to tempt the men around her. She is lonely and unfulfilled in her marriage and she wants to feel loved. Both of these characters terrorize Lennie simply because his diminished mental capacity makes him an easy target. They also behave terribly towards the only black person working on the ranch, a man named Crooks, because the racism of the time period allows them to. Both behave as badly as they can get away with and abuse whatever power they have over others. 

The contrast to this behavior is George, who uses his power in a much more positive way. He does everything he can to protect Lennie, even though he is not related to him and has no formal obligations to stay with him. Lennie himself says several times throughout the novel that George can just leave him if he's too much trouble, and that he will disappear into the mountains and fend for himself. George, however, refuses to abandon him. In a world where most of the other characters use whatever leverage they have to serve their own selfish ends, George actually helps someone occupying a lower place in society than him. Other characters comment on how odd this is - how you rarely see two friends travelling together and helping each other out. It's like trying to be kind is the exception rather than the rule. After reading the novel and seeing how his efforts turn out, its clear that even the best intentions often aren't enough to overcome the seemingly innate cruelty of the world.

I was left wondering, is the real world that tough? Is kindness a rare and often futile gesture in the face of the overwhelming selfishness of others? Granted, Of Mice and Men isn't the perfect coda to our reality. None of the characters are perfect and the plot is more complex than a simple question of good versus bad. However, looking around at the state of things in the U.S. at this moment, one does have to wonder how the ratio between selfishness and kindness looks. Are there more Curleys or more Georges in the world? How many kind actions actually overcome the meanness projected by everyone else?

I don't mean to sound so pessimistic here. Of course I believe that being kind is important no matter what anyone else is doing. This novel did make me think quite a lot about those kinds of questions though and explore the different ways people can use their power. It's nice to go back and reread classics for this reason. I certainly wasn't pondering the ties between social status and behavior when I was a teenager sitting in the bleachers finishing this novel for the first time, but revisiting it made me think about aspects of the text that I didn't pay much attention to before.

No matter how many times I end up reading Of Mice and Men though, it will stay a favorite for me. It's an emotional, simple masterpiece exploring both the best and worst of humanity. I have liked pretty much all of the Steinbeck novels I have read over the years, but this one is truly special. 

Challenge Tally

Then vs. Now: 16/27

Total Books Read in 2020: 57