What Are The Similarities Between Of Mice And Men

During the Great Depression, people had to come from all over to farms in order to survive. Through this, they were unable to step out of line so as to keep their place on the ranch. John Steinbeck was able to portray this accurately in his novella Of Mice and Men, where the characters choose to stay alone. They are similar to actors in a play (McMurray) because they have an assigned role and aren’t allowed to break away. In Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck displays some fundamental issues with American society as it rarely allows those that are dealt a bad hand to increase their status. The world won’t stop for people of the underclass trying to improve their lives. In the ruthless environment of the Dust Bowl, this held true,

He believes that he could truly achieve his dream of getting the land, but it later proves futile because achieving that would break his set role in the world, and this society destroys that dream. In Steinbeck’s article “The Harvest Gypsies”, Steinbeck explains that “there is one overwhelming need, to acquire a little land again, and to settle on it and stop their wandering… one has only to look at the strong purposeful faces, often filled with pain and more often, when they see the corporation-held idle lands, filled with anger, to know that this new race is here to stay.” Steinbeck believes migrant workers are destined to be migrant workers. They have to deal with the pain of survival as they will never be able to own land. George is one of these migrants described because his whole idea is that he wants to buy the land. He gets just within reach of it with the financial support of the other outcasts on the ranch, but the dream dies in an instant because he mistakenly trusts Lennie too hard. He has to keep being a lone migrant without his one friend. George is unable to change how he lives, despite being

The competition of everyone else in this setting of economic failure further contributes to Steinbeck’s claim. Because the economic position from which the migrants came had been destroyed due to the crop failures and farm loss of the Dust Bowl, everyone on the ranch is competing to get enough food and survive. George has to stay the low man on the totem pole because his personality does not allow him to hurt others for his own gain. Although George is heroic, he is coerced back into his role as a migrant. Today, people of lower classes, like modern migrant workers and other low-skilled workers are kept in their places in society. They don’t get paid enough to afford better things, like land and houses. Through things like the house renting system, people have to keep paying an ever-increasing amount of money to stay in a house, and they are never able to afford their own place to live. Of Mice and Men parallels this as the migrants have to keep working on the ranches to feed themselves for a little while, and then on to the next place. They both can’t ever scrounge together enough money to live their dream, so they stay poor