Of Mice And Men Justified

In the U.S., over 6.5 million citizens are labeled as intellectually disabled. In the novella by John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, the story is set in the late 1930s and follows the journey of two migrant workers; an ordinary man named George Milton and his intellectually disabled childhood friend, Lennie Smalls. Because Lennie has uncontrollable monstrous strength plus the inability to think rationally in stressful situations, prevents George from obtaining his American dream, and gets himself in an inescapable death position, George killing Lennie was justified. To begin, Lennie has impressive strength that he cannot control, along with not being able to think reasonably in intense situations. When Lennie has something in his hands and gets startled, he has a tendency to start to use lots of force on the subject he’s holding. The amount of force he generates just from his hands is capable of

Near the end of the novel, Lennie accidentally murders Curley’s wife, so he runs away to the brush George told him to go to if he ever does something bad. Once Curley found out about the murder of his wife, he gathered the ranch workers to set out on an expedition to get revenge. According to Of Mice and Men, it states, “‘We can’t let ‘im get away. Why, the poor bastard’d starve.’ And he tried to reassure himself. ‘Maybe they’ll lock ‘im up an’ be nice to ‘im.’ But Candy said excitedly, ‘We oughtta let ‘im get away. You don’t know that Curley. Curley gon’ta wanta get ‘im lynched,’” (Steinbeck 91). This means George acknowledges the fact that Lennie is incapable of surviving in the wilderness by himself and Candy makes it clear that Curley will kill Lennie. Therefore, George murdering Lennie with a single bullet without him knowing he was going to die was reasonable since Lennie would have had a slow death from starvation or be eventually found by Curley’s mob and killed in a painful