Weakness In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

In his novella, Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck uses oppression of the weak, by the weak, to illustrate that oppression does not always come from the strong. With the exception being Slim, all major characters mentioned in Steinbeck’s novella are weak and have some sort of flaw. Slim has none. Even when he is first introduced, Slim is described as having a “gravity in his manner”(33). He is depicted as perfect, and therefore, has no weaknesses. Contrarily, every other major character in the novella does have a weakness of some sort. Lennie and George’s weakness, for instance, is Lennie’s mental disability. Lennie’s mental disability does not allow Lennie to move forward in his life without assistance, which, since Lennie’s Aunt Clara died,

Crooks and Curley’s wife are prime examples of this. Because they are weak, the only way they can feel strong is by making others around them feel weaker. Crooks, when talking to Lennie, wants to see him at his most vulnerable point, so, he criticizes his dream, one of the two things Lennie cares about. He says to Lennie that, “[He’s] seen hundreds of men come by on the road… an’ every damn one of ‘em’s got a little piece of land in [their] head. An’ never a God damn one of ‘em ever gets it.”(74). Crooks realized that if he talks bad about his dream, that will put Lennie down, allowing himself to be the strongest in the room. Crooks also attacks the one other thing Lennie cares about, George. Crooks asks, “s’pose George don’t come back no more… What’ll you do then?”(70). This caused Lennie to cry, saying that “‘George wouldna do sumtin like that’”(71). And Lennie, for the minute he did believe Crooks, was weak and very vulnerable. A final example of the weak wanting to feel strong is when Curley’s wife threatens Crooks with the implication of lynching. Crooks, though, felt so strong himself from the prior conversation with Lennie, that when Curley’s wife walked into the barnhouse, “Crooks stood up from his bunk and faced her.” ‘I had enough… You got no rights comin’ in a colored man’s room.”’(80). Curley’s wife then, being weak herself, saw a situation to be strong and took it. She put him down by using the N-word and then asking if he knew“‘what [she] [could]do to [him]if [he][opened] [his] trap?’” (80), implying that she would get him lynched. Using the N-word is a huge insult for African-Americans and lynching has a horrible connotation to slavery. Curley’s wife wanted Crooks to be at his weakest point, by attacking the thing that defines him most: his skin color. Similar to how Crooks attacked the two things that define