Animal imagery shows to represent valuable meaning to Steinbeck’s work through brutality, foreshadowing of death, and misery. Of Mice and Men is a novel published by John Steinbeck in 1937. Animal imagery goes on to play a key role in a small town in California, as Lennie Smalls and George Milton dive into the hardest times of the great depression. Situations will be to be hard, but animal imagery must facilitate the reader’s views about the life. Brutality is the definition of acting or being compared to an animal or beast, consequently acting with little intelligence and a high altitude of violence. Animal imagery passes throughout the book in a fast pace manner, specifically with Lennie as George often scowls Lennie about behaving well. In the beginning of the book, Lennie’s introduction offers an idea about Lennie as both men get close to a water stream. Lennie 's brain in the first place never seemed to function properly as having fun meant the only goal to Lennie, “Lennie dabbled his big paw in the water and wiggled his finger so the water arose" (3). The instincts of bear signify brutality and little intellectual mind as Steinbeck 's imagery about Lennie portrays nature in its cruelty to the weak. Lennie’s comprehension of the world takes a long route from killing a mouse to strangling Curley 's wife, brutality at the end resulted in pushing Lennie into then fears of the world, as everyone is to fence against each other. Physical violence ties heavily to brutality