Archetypes In Of Mice And Men

Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, is a story about discrimination due to someone being different in any way. The reader learns how people were treated and discriminated in 1930s during the great depression. This is important because this issue continues even to this day. This problem has been around for a very long time. Steinbeck uses Archetypes,Symbolism, and Setting to convey the theme of discrimination.

Steinbeck uses Archetypes to represent various larger groups of people at that time in order to show how each group was discriminated. Lennie is symbolic of the “wise fool” archetype, being mentally inferior but being able to reveal the best and worst of others. Like when he was talking with crooks. Crooks scowled, but Lennie's disarming smile defeated

Mice represent the false hope of a safe space for Lennie and his vulnerability. During the course of the book, we see lennie with serveral mice, as he links them to his Aunt for a warm reminder, but it also makes it clear that he suffers from the problem of hurting what he loves, he likes to pet soft things, resulting in him killing curley's wife and his puppy, thus lennie suffers in the end. Due to them being small, they are able to be killed very easily physically, as in the way that lennie is mentally small that leads into his downfall. Rabbits represent self sufficiency, but ultimately false hope in the end. This is shown during the book when lennie loves to pet them, but knows they are likely going to die afterwards due to how strong he is. At the end of the book, he hallucinates a "gigantic rabbit" that tells him he "ain't fit to lick the boots of no rabbit. You'd forget 'em and let 'em go hungry". This giant rabbit suggest that deep down, lennie knows that his dream will never come true. These symbols show just how segregated and sad these people are due to their race or