Every reading group that takes on Of Mice and Men ends up arguing about the last page. Was George right? Could he have done anything else? The argument is worth having, but it tends to crowd out a better question, which is why nobody on that ranch is in a position to help him. This piece gives away the whole plot, including the ending.
Of Mice and Men is populated almost entirely by people who have been pushed to the edge of the only community available to them. Reading it through them rather than through the plot turns a sad story about two friends into something considerably harder.
The Four People Of Mice and Men Shuts Out
Candy is old and has one hand, lost in a machine on this ranch, for which he was paid two hundred and fifty dollars. He knows precisely what happens next, because he has watched it happen: when he can no longer be useful he will be let go, and he has nowhere to go.
Crooks is excluded by race. He sleeps apart from the men in a shed by the barn, and the book is blunt about the language used to and about him. Longer on the place than anybody, he has ended up with a damaged spine and a shelf of reading. One of the volumes is a law book covering the rights of citizens in California, well used. Nobody keeps that on a shelf without a reason.
Curley’s wife is shut out by sex. She is the only woman present and is treated as a danger by every man on the place, who have decided among themselves that she is trouble before she has done anything.
Lennie is excluded by a mind that cannot hold a rule for more than an afternoon. His exclusion is the only one George can partly cover for, and covering for it is the full-time job that has shaped George’s life.
Set them side by side and the pattern in Of Mice and Men is plain enough. Not one of these four is excluded for anything they did. Age, race, sex and a damaged mind are all conditions rather than choices, and the ranch treats every one of them as a reason to keep somebody at arm’s length. The only man who arrived with nothing against him is George, and he has spent years voluntarily tied to someone who did.
The Woman Of Mice and Men Never Names
Of Mice and Men calls her Curley’s wife on every one of her appearances. No character names her, and the narration never supplies one, so she exists in the text only as a possession.
Then, in the barn, she tells Lennie something she has clearly told nobody. A man once said he would put her in pictures and write to her, and the letter never came, and she believes her mother intercepted it. She married Curley two weeks later because she was not going to spend her life in Salinas. Within pages of finally being given a history she is dead, killed by the one person on the ranch who will listen to her.
What a group should decide is whether the namelessness is a criticism or an example of the thing being criticised. The case for Steinbeck is that the anonymity is the point, that the book makes you feel her erasure rather than explaining it. The case against is harder to shift: Crooks gets a name, a room, a biography and a reason for his bitterness, and the only woman on the ranch gets none of those things until she has about six pages left.
The Dream Is a Conversation, Not a Plan
The farm with the rabbits does something more interesting than symbolise the American dream. It is the only subject on the ranch that makes people talk to each other honestly.
Notice who joins and what each one is really after. George wants to stop being responsible for another man’s survival in a world that keeps moving him on. Lennie wants soft animals he is allowed to touch. Candy, who has three hundred and fifty dollars put aside and a clear view of his own future, wants somewhere he will not be thrown out of when he stops being able to work. Crooks, listening from his doorway, asks whether he might come and hoe in the garden, and asks it in the tone of a man who expects to be refused.
Four people with incompatible lives briefly agree on one thing. It lasts about a page. Curley’s wife walks into Crooks’s room, reminds him what she could do to him with a word, and he withdraws the request immediately. The alliance that might have saved all of them is broken by the one person on the ranch who is lonelier than they are.
That is the real tragedy of Of Mice and Men, and it is a political one. These people have every reason to combine and no capacity to do it, because each has been taught to guard the tiny bit of standing they have left against everyone below them.
Why Candy’s Dog Decides the Ending of Of Mice and Men
The dog thread is where Of Mice and Men quietly settles its own ending. Carlson wants the animal shot because it smells. Candy has had it since it was a pup and resists until resistance becomes impossible, and then lies on his bunk with his face to the wall while a stranger takes it outside and shoots it in the back of the head.
Afterwards Candy says the line that decides the ending of the book: he ought to have shot it himself rather than letting someone else do it.
For a discussion, the useful move is to ask what Candy is actually claiming. Not that the dog should have lived. He accepts that it should not. He is saying that the killing belonged to him, and that handing it to an indifferent man was the betrayal. Every reader who thinks George was wrong at the pool has to answer Candy first.
Slim Is the Book’s Only Working Authority
Among all these excluded people stands one man who is not excluded at all, and a group that overlooks him will miss how Of Mice and Men is balanced.
Slim is the jerkline skinner, the best hand on the ranch, and the narration treats him with a reverence it extends to nobody else. His word is described as law on any subject. He is the only character who gets a genuinely admiring introduction, and the only one everybody defers to, including the boss’s son.
What matters for a discussion is what he does with that standing. He gives Lennie a puppy. He tells Carlson to take a shovel when the dog is shot, which is the single small mercy anyone extends to Candy that evening. And he works out the truth about George and Lennie in one conversation and does not use it. At the end he is the only person who understands what George has done and why, and he says the necessary sentence: that George had to, and that it was not wrong.
And yet he does not stop any of it. He agrees the dog should be shot. He does not intervene for Crooks. And he lets Curley’s hunt go ahead. Slim has more authority than anyone on the ranch and applies it only after the damage, in the form of sympathy.
A group can read that two ways, and both are productive. Slim may be the proof that decency survives in this world, which is the consoling reading. Or he may be the sharpest criticism in the book: a thoroughly good man with real power who never once uses it to change an outcome, only to make people feel better about outcomes he allowed. The second reading is harder to argue against, and it makes the ending considerably colder.
The Ranch as a Real Economy
The setting is a Salinas Valley ranch in the Depression, and the money in it is worked out exactly. Men are sent out from a hiring office with a work card, bunk together in a single room where a nailed-up crate holds everything they possess, collect their wages, spend them in town over a weekend and move along. There is no pension and no protection; Candy’s compensation for his hand was a lump sum and the right to sweep floors.
Steinbeck had done this work with his own hands years earlier, and it shows in how little the labour is romanticised. The book appeared in 1937 and reached Broadway the same year in a version that barely altered the text, because he had designed it from the start to be performable as written.
That design is worth knowing when you are reading aloud in a group. The chapters are single continuous scenes in single rooms, and nobody ever gets an interior monologue, so every piece of information in Of Mice and Men has to be spoken out loud by somebody to somebody else. Read a chapter round the table and it works, because it was built to.
The racial language is the period’s, used by characters who mean it, and the novella does not soften it. A group reading aloud should agree in advance how to handle those passages.
Questions Worth Bringing to a Meeting
- Candy says he should have shot his own dog. Does that justify what George does, or only explain it?
- Curley’s wife has no name. Is that Steinbeck’s judgement on the ranch, or his own blind spot?
- Crooks asks to join the farm and then takes it back. What exactly makes him withdraw?
- If the four outsiders had combined, what would have stopped them?
- George tells Lennie he was never angry with him. Is that true?
How Of Mice and Men Ends, and the Man Who Misses It
George finds Lennie at the pool, tells the farm story one last time with Lennie supplying the familiar lines, and sends him to look across the river so that he never sees it coming. Then he uses Carlson’s pistol, aimed exactly where Carlson aimed at the dog.
The last exchange in Of Mice and Men belongs to Slim and Carlson. Slim understands at once, says George had to do it, and takes him away for a drink. Carlson watches them go and asks what is eating those two.
Clubs that want more of this period will find the same economics from a woman’s side in The Four Winds, and our analysis of Pride and Prejudice takes the same close-reading approach to a very different kind of exclusion.
Steinbeck gives the final line to the man who cannot tell the difference between shooting a dog and shooting a friend, and then stops. He does not answer the question, because the whole novella has been the answer, and because leaving Carlson unanswered is the bleakest available ending. The ranch will carry on exactly as it was. Nothing that happened has taught it anything.
Read in the Penguin paperback; Steinbeck’s copyright dates from 1937 and was renewed in 1965. Burns supplies the title, in a poem addressed to a mouse whose nest a plough has just destroyed.