Should George Have Killed Lennie Small

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Imagine someone having to kill his best friend, but only to save his life. George Milton and Lennie Small, two characters in Of Mice and Men, written by John Steinbeck, are two migrant workers who happened to be the best of friends and created a brotherhood between each other during the Great Depression. George is a small, but lean and strong man, while Lennie is an extremely tall person with sloping shoulders and has an almost featureless face, and has a quite severe mental disorder that prevents him from remembering many things. The story takes place in the 1930s, while the infamous Great Depression took place, so George and Lennie were constantly on the move and meeting many different people along the way. At the conclusion of their friendship, …show more content…

Some people believe that killing another human being for the sake of “putting them out of their misery” is the right thing to do. They are wrong. The act of committing homicide cannot be reversed. He is taking away an indefinite amount of time from a person’s life : time that an individual might become stronger or even fully recover. That is why George should not have taken Lennie’s life away for the intention of saving his life. Mercy killing is not the right thing to do; therefore George should not have of killed Lennie the way he did. John Wise was a 66 year old man who had no criminal record and no known history of violence, found his wife on the ground on the bathroom floor, later learning that she had suffered a triple aneurysm, and she was in the hospital for a week. Although in this situation, it was within a week where she suffered a triple …show more content…

You must acknowledge that in the day and age of the Great Depression, it was common where if there was a wrongdoing that was committed by someone, people would take measures that we consider extreme, such as murder. Nevertheless, with there being no actual proof that the men were going to actually murder Lennie, they only said they were going to, which would mean they are basically all talk. In a conversation about the punishment Lennie is going to face, George suggests “Couldn’ we maybe bring him in an’ they’ll lock him up? He’s nuts Slim. He never done this to be mean.” Slim nodded. ‘We might,’ he said. If we could keep Curley in, we might” (Steinbeck 97). With Slim acknowledging that there was a possibility they will not have to kill him, but rather lock him in a prison, it shows that there is nothing that could prove that Lennie will be murdered and mocked. Lennie was in a problem that was far beyond any other he has ever had, but there is nothing that guarantees that Lennie would have of been