Of Mice And Men Inevitable Analysis

Of Mice and Men Essay

Was the ending in Of Mice and Men inevitable or not?

The novella Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck was originally published in 1937. The novella follows George Milton and Lennie Small, two migrant workers looking for jobs on ranches. George is the smart leader and Lennie is the mentally challenged follower who doesn’t know his own overpowering strength. They arrive to a ranch and come close to reaching George’s dream of owning their own ranch and Lennie’s dream of tending rabbits. Unfortunately, Lennie accidentally kills a woman on the ranch and George chooses to kill Lennie before a mob of other people could possibly doom him in prison, torture him, or hurt him in a worse way. This ending was not inevitable and the novella could have ended in another,

The promise from Curley “I’m gonna shoot the guts outta that big bastard myself” suggests we may see Lennie’s demise at the hands of Curley. Curley and Lennie do fight earlier in the book, but it doesn’t really have a proper resolution and it seems like there is more to follow. Curley shows hate to Lennie from their first meeting beginning with “Lennie squirming [squirmed] under his [the] look and shifting [shifted] his feet nervously. Curley stepped gingerly close to him.” This displays the immediate rivalry between Lennie and Curley, because Curley first singles out and confronts Lennie for seaming weak. The novella seemed quite ready to wrap this conflict up in the climax with Lennie being shot or killed some other way by Curley, but Steinbeck chooses a different route. The ending was not inevitable, because some foreshadowed events did not end properly or reach where they could have reached and the climax could have had a major pay off.

Secondly, the ending to Of Mice and Men could have been different due to the cultural context of the time. This book was set in the Great Depression, a time great social, political, and