Of mice and men

Compare varying ideas of "place" in John Steinbeck´s Of Mice and Men. How does the dream of "a place" figure in the lives of characters in the novel?

There are at least four ideas of "place" in Of Mice and Men to be considered. The first idea could be the "place" considered as the setting of the beginning of the story, where we see an idilic place, a wood full of trees, but also with a sense of destruction as we see the footsteps on the grass and the broken trees. The importance of this setting of the beginning is that it is repeated at the end of the story, where we find and idilic wood and some predator animal which could prepare us for the tragical ending.

Another idea of “place” is the ranch from which George and Lennie come and the ranch to where they both go; these are physical places, from the first one they have to scape because of Lennie and in the second is where the whole action of the novel is developed. The second ranch is a microcosm where everyone plays a role, from The Boss to Crooks. Each of the characters which live there are really determined by that place.

Within this place, the ranch, we find a very special place too; Crooks´ private room. He does not allow whites in but he lets Lennie to g

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Are caracter are lonely and unhappy with their lives (except Slim), but none of them can scape from this unhappiness. She tells him how unhappy she is with Curley and that she also had a dream about Hollywood that fate had denied her. She is hurt and she shouts, Lennie is scared and as he tries to shut her mouth up he breaks her neck and kills her. But although the farm exists something will go wrong because of the fight between Lennie and Curley, Lennie does not control himself. This foreshadows the event of Curley´s wife in the barn. But George in his inside knows that something will go wrong as he tells Lennie that if something goes wrong he has to hide behind the bushes and then meet him in the clearing.

There, in the barn, Curley´s wife tries to talk with Lennie. These vision are not real and George learns that hard lesson after Lennie´s death and he goes back to a life of lost illusions.

Lennie goes to the barn to hide the puppy ,which he has accidentaly killed, in the hay, because if George finds it he will as always tell him how horrible is to look after him, etc. There is a correlation between the dream of Lennie and the dream of George if Lennie´s is impossible to come true George won´t neither. Crooks thinks that the farm-dream is something invented by Lennie and that every ranch hand has the same dream that never happens.

When George kills Lennie is a very important moment related to the dream of “a place”.

Candy (an old ranch hand) feels eager to join the other men in their paradise and he thinks about contributing to the dream with the money he has saved throughout his life.

But the most important idea of the story is “place” as George´s dream.

Approximate Word count = 1246
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

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