Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck takes place during the dust bowl. Work was hard to come by, and people never settled down often. The main characters, George and Lennie, are two men looking for work. Their dream is to one day own a small farm of their own. The two men are opposites of each other. Lennie is mentally slow, but huge and strong, where George is small and does most of the thinking for the two.

There are two main settings in the book. One is at the ranch where George and Lennie have a job buckling barley and the other is a river bank where the story starts and ends. Steinbeck originally wrote Of Mice and Men to be a play, therefore the settings are minimal.

Steinbeck uses a lot of foreshadowing in his writing. An example of this is at the beginning of the story where Lennie kills the mouse. This foreshadows the death of the puppy and Curley’s wife, and ultimately the death of Lennie himself.

There are parts of this book that remind me of The Old Man and The Sea. Both show the struggles of an ordinary man trying to make a living. Both main characters come so close to reaching their goals only to have life slap them in the face. The Old Man catches the fish of his dreams only to have it eaten by sharks on the way home. George and Lennie are just one hundred dollars short before Lennie accidently kills Curly’s wife.

I enjoyed this book because it was a good story. I found it to be easy to follow with a clear beginning and end, unlike The House on Mango Street.