Death In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

In John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men, George and Lennie go through ups and downs within their relationship that changes what they thought their future would hold. From day to day Lennie and George encounter unfortunate plans that could’ve been stopped but were not due to Lennie’s incompetence. In his novel, Steinbeck uses motifs of death and characters’ hands as well as foreshadowing to convey that the best of plans can be overruled by the uncertainty of outside forces, ultimately suggesting that life is unpredictable.
Steinbeck develops a motif of death through the many different animals that pass away within the novel as a metaphor for the the demise of Lennie and George’s plans. Lennie is never made out to be a killer, that is until

Lennie has always been more strong physically, then mentally, being unaware of his strength leads Lennie to using his hands to silence Curley’s Wife, “She struggled violently under his hands” (91). Lennie didn’t mean for this to happen and it became the big turning point to Lennie and George’s plans. Lennie was only trying to silence Curley’s Wife so that George wouldn’t hear her and get mad for her yelling. When Slim and the men are all together, they are constantly bothered by the smell of Candy’s dog. Slim decided it would be a good idea to finally end the smell of the dog so that no one would be bothered by it anymore and by doing so they have to kill the dog, “Slim gazed at him for a moment and then looked down at his hands; he subdued one hand with the other, and held it down” (49). Carlson’s hands were subdued, meaning that with force, Carlson made his hands do this. He struggled for a bit until the trigger was pulled. This was not supposed to be who George and Lennie surrounded themselves with. They were previously in a bad town with bad people, once again put back into that