Loneliness In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

In the story “Of Mice and Men” loneliness is a major part of the story. At least once in the story, someone will become lonely. He illustrates that in order to escape loneliness, people are driven to find a friend. He uses names such as “Soledad”, the name of the ranch, which means loneliness, and the card game that is played by the characters “Solitaire” which means by one’s self. He makes it really clear that the people on the ranch are lonely. Steinbeck uses the setting to bring these ideas.
As they were walking down the path, it’s illustrated as “ a path beaten by hard boys coming down from the ranches to swim in the deep pool, and beaten hard by tramps who come wearily down from the highway in the evening to jungle-up near water” (p.2) This produces the setting and shows how the men that work on the ranch have limited, lonely lives. Steinbeck also says “an ash pile made by many fires” (p.2) This shows that all the men that walked that road to enter an isolated life, moved to the ranch to find useless work. Also in the way Steinbeck describes the bunkhouse, signifies loneliness. “Over each bunk there was nailed an apple box with the opening forward so that it made two shelves for personal belongings of the occupant of the bunk.” (p.10)

Crooks is one of them. He suffers from loneliness because he’s a nigger and he lives on a ranch that is surrounded by racism. He lives alone because the others don’t like him. He is left out of everything. He reads books so that he is no longer lonely, but the books get boring and he is lonely again. Crooks is desperate for company and when Lennie comes in his room, he just starts talking. Crooks tells Lennie “A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. Don’t matter no difference who the guy is, long’s he with you. I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an he gets sick” (p.36) This indicates that Crooks is lonely and desperate for a friend to talk