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Of Mice And Men Figurative Language Analysis

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Marco Rubio, a respected politician and the Senator of Florida once said, “The American Dream is a term which is often used but also often misunderstood. It isn’t really about becoming rich or famous. It is about things much simpler and more fundamental than that.” Of Mice and Men revolves around the Great Depression and migrating farmers who are in the search of a better life. Through the use of figurative language, a wide lexical range and varying sentence length, Steinbeck portrays the bunk house as being an allegorical prison and the residents being prisoners because of the harsh realities of the Great Depression and the dying American Dream. His use of these literary devices to portray this idea impels the reader to follow the journey …show more content…

He wrote,“the sun threw a bright dust- laden bar through one of the side windows, and in and out beam flies shot like rushing stars”. Beam flies metaphorically represent the dreams the farmers have of one day owning a ranch, living a peaceful life or achieving the American Dream for themselves. Beam flies also represent the hope that the farmers have of improving their lives. The sun symbolizes that everyday is a fresh start for the migrant workers and another opportunity to accomplish their dreams. The sun also represents the light or hope in the dark and bleak lives of the workers. The “bright dust - laden bar” symbolizes that the hope the farmers have is still ambiguous and dissatisfactory to their increasing anguishes. “ Like rushing stars” represent that the hope or dreams that they have are brief and do not last very long because they are hit with the austere realities of the Great Depression before they can get carried away with their imaginations. “ Like rushing stars” also symbolizes the innocence in a child and how every man possess that innocence in himself. The innocence is connoted through the childish language which Steinbeck uses in this

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Chapter 5 of John Steinback’s book, Of Mice and Men, vividly depicts Lennie immersing in a world of anger, sorrow, and worry after he tragically killed a little puppy. Lennie strategically employs passive voice to mask his responsibility for the dead puppy and his word choice shows his ambivalence towards the puppy. It’s evident that Lennie goes through a spectrum of emotions. Chapter 5 starts out with Lennie mournfully “[Stroking the dog] clear from one end to the other” (85).

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The main idea of “Spring 1934” is that dust and drought are ripping apart the lives of the West coast civilians. For example, you can find this in “Beat Wheat.” This poem shows that the dust is terrorizing the farmer’s food source and income, and making townsfolk (mostly farmers) lose hope. You can see the lost hope from Country Agent Dewey saying "Soon there won't be enough wheat for seed to plant next fall. " “Beat Wheat” is also showing how the future of townsfolk are being affected by the dust, like how Billie Jo and Joe De La Flor’s are.

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7. Cisneros does not represent dialect, slangs, and accents for poetic and comprehension purposes. The deletion of dialect, slangs, and accents contribute to its purpose to communicate the story in a more poetic manner. The themes and symbols use in the poetic writing are more significant when there is no dialect that could interfere with the figurative language. The structure of the novel could potentially be confusing to the reader, so the use of familiar language and style makes it easier to understand and perhaps more relatable.

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During the time of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression many small farmers lost their farms due to poor farmer conditions. Those who managed to continue to produce a crop yield eventually lost their farms due to the failing economy. This harsh time is highlighted in John Steinbeck’s classic novel, Grapes of Wrath. During one of Steinbeck’s intercalary chapters, chapter 14, Steinbeck uses pathos, a metaphor, and short syntax to show that big business, especially in the agricultural industry, is the root of the hardships faced by small farmers and migrant workers.     Steinbeck uses a different form of pathos to draw his readers and make it so that the audience can understand the severity of the suffering that the migrant families are facing.

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This chapter takes place in a dry, desolate land in the midst of drought, Steinbeck describes the terrain as "gray mountains and brown mountains, dry and rocky, rising toward each other until they caught the yellow daylight" (Steinbeck, 2006, p. 325). Using diction Steinbeck creates a tone of despair by describing the uninhabitable terrain and conditions that the migrant workers must endure in order to survive. Steinbeck builds onto

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In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck describes a pair of Depression-era children as they rush “immediately to the candy case” inside a diner, staring at the sweets “not with hope or … desire, but with a kind of wonder that such things could be” (51-52). This heartbreaking image of two poor boys staring at candy in awe elicits empathy because it implies that their parents are struggling to provide for them and that they have never eaten candy due to the hardship and poverty they were raised in. Similarly, Steinbeck elicits empathy in “The Harvest Gypsies” as he chronicles the unsanitary living conditions of California migrant workers during the 1930s. One family’s rotting tent is “full of flies … buzzing about the foul clothes of the children” and a baby, “who has not been bathed” for days (41). The image of flies swarming around the tent evokes empathy for the workers, who have to endure the pests on a daily basis, because it suggests disease, poverty, and feelings of disgust and hopelessness.

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John Steinbeck, in the novel, Grapes of Wrath, identifies the hardships and struggle to portray the positive aspects of the human spirit amongst the struggle of the migrant farmers and the devastation of the Dust Bowl. Steinbeck supports his defense by providing the reader with imagery, symbolism and intense biblical allusions. The author’s purpose is to illustrate the migrant farmers in order to fully exploit their positive aspects in the midst of hardships. Steinbeck writes in a passionate tone for an audience that requires further understanding of the situation.

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The narrator described the setting in the beginning as “twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight” (Steinbeck 1), but later on he stated that “the sun had left the valley” (Steinbeck 99). These quotes foreshadow what is going to happen later in the story because of their relation to dreams and fate. Steinbeck uses sunlight to represent dreams and he uses darkness to represent fate. The characteristics of a dream and sunlight both consist of beauty, happiness, and brightness ahead. Darkness and fate are known for their scary realities.

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Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck is a well known classic that depicts the life of migrant workers''' during the great depression. As this book may seem uninteresting, it actually has been shown immense respect in the literature world. It has stood the test of time and is a primary book being taught in schools today. The theme played a big role in making this happen. Without realization kids are able to relate to the reason that it depicts loneliness and betrayal.

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Even by working hard, people don’t always get what they want. In the book Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, Lennie and George are two friends who are traveling to find a job, so they can finally earn money and live their dream life. They find the farm, and they had a hard path in the future to get their dream. Whether they will reach it is the real question. John Steinbeck developed the impossibility of the American dream in the 1930s by showing that people worked hard for their dreams, if they can’t physically do work they aren’t interesting to people, and people following their dreams become selfish.

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833 Words | 4 Pages

John Steinbeck’s, Of Mice and Men, is a compelling story that has captured and embodied the struggle and loneliness felt by many during the Great Depression. While desire for the American Dream is prominent in the novel, Steinbeck is able to demonstrate the wants from different social classes through the construction of characters such as George Milton and Curley’s wife. With these characters, Steinbeck successfully displays the difference in ideas, values and attitudes of certain social classes in the 1930’s and the illustrates the rarity of achieving the American Dream. Steinbeck wrote this novel during the Great Depression, when America was suffering greatly by the disastrous crash of the stock market. From this point in time, separation of the different classes became

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Since 1931 when James Truslow Adams first created the phrase “the American Dream”, people believed that America continuously offered everyone an equal opportunity to be successful. John Steinbeck’s novella, Of Mice and Men, was set during the Great Depression. Farms were struck hard during the Depression, and the two main characters George and Lennie were farm hands during this time. They had experienced the misunderstandings of other farm hands in terms of Lennie’s mental disability, but they were trying to earn enough money to buy their own farm. The idea of this farm drove Lennie and George to keep working, and like many others during this time they hoped to achieve this dream.

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The Dust Bowl, beginning in the 1930s, added to the struggle of American farmers as lands out west in states such as Oklahoma and Kansas were over-plowed, causing the topsoil to become uprooted, creating massive dust storms. These dust storms left the land unusable to farm, displacing many Americans in the agricultural industry. Steinbeck’s The Harvest Gypsies displays the struggles these farmers faced when moving west to California, hoping to find some sort of work. Many displaced farmers lived in squatters’ camps, temporary dwellings for those looking for work. Steinbeck described these camps as having awful living conditions, saying that “From a distance it looks like a city dump, and well it may, for the city dumps are the sources for the material of which it is built.”

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Of Mice and Men depicts a migrant worker and the struggles they face while trying to make their dream become a reality. Steinbeck highlights the perceived isolation and fight for independence that can

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Everyone aspires to achieve the American Dream: an opportunity to be successful by working hard. Throughout the novel Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, the American Dream brings hope for a better life for those who hold onto it. George Milton and Lennie Smalls, traveling ranch workers called bindle stiffs, dream of owning their own piece of land where they create the rules. They are not the only characters with hopes and dreams. But Steinbeck shows the American Dream is, in fact, sometimes just a dream through the hopes and actions of Lennie, Candy, and Curley’s wife.

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