A Comparison Of Power In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

Turning on the news to see another powerful dictator, or a new segregation issue is heart crushing. The fight for power is never ending, resulting in a disproportionate spread of it. The severity of these problems are rising to be a larger issue, an issue that Steinbeck noticed and brought much attention to in his novella, Of Mice and Men. He uses his characters to display the idea that power is too often unequally distributed, meaning some have too much power and others have too meager of an amount. Differing ranges of power then have negative impacts on people, as does Curley's power. Curley's character constantly seems to need to feel threatening and dominate, as shown in Steinbeck's lesson that having an abundance of power as he does, negatively affects people.

In brief, as shown through Curley's actions, Steinbeck shows that power is unequally distributed, causing a negative impact on people. Differing from Curley, Crooks has too meager of an amount of power, still supporting Steinbeck's lesson of unequally distributed power. Here, readers take insight of the way Crooks, the black stable boy is enslaved to live in and how his conditions affect him, “And scattered about the floor were a number of personal possessions for being alone Crooks could leave his things about, and being a stable boy buck and a cripple, he was more permanent than other men” (Steinbeck 68). We see that due to a lack of power, Crooks didn't have the privilege to live with everyone else, and that he was called a “buck boy cripple”. Living and working by his lonesome causes even more negativity, resulting in isolation. This illustrates Steinbeck's lesson by Crooks’s lack of power, and showing its negative effects. In addition, Curley's wife torments Crooks for speaking up in a conversation, “She closed on him. ‘You know what I could do?’ Crooks seemed to grow smaller as he pressed himself against the