Euthanasia In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

Of Mice and Mice and men consist of many examples of euthanasia. Euthanasia is assisted suicide, physician-assisted suicide , doctor-assisted dying , and more loosely termed mercy killing, means to take a deliberate action with the express intention of ending a life to relieve suffering. In Of Mice and Men George killed Lennie by shooting him in the back of the head. The reason behind the killing was because George was left with little to no options on what to do with Lennie. Since Lennie was incapable of making the decision of if he wanted to die or not George was the only other one who had the right to decide. It might be hard to kill someone you have spent so much time with but George did what was best for Lennie and it was by killing him. …show more content…
The book started off suggesting Lennie was dumb and mentally slow. As the story goes on we can see Lennie’s disorder get worse and worse. Throughout the whole book we see Lennie suffer from a mental disorder. George states, “He [Lennie] ain't no cuckoo, he's dumb as hell but he ain't crazy,” George knows that Lennie is dumb and even tells Slim in this quote. Good examples of this would be when Lennie killed the puppy because he was petting him too hard and when he killed Curley's wife not even realizing he was hurting her. Lennie did not know he was killing 2 living things which just goes to show you that he is not capable of making any decisions of whether he should live. Even though Lennie is big he still isn’t very smart. Lennie has just as much logic as a newborn baby and in source B it states “unbearable suffering must be present” and “unbearable suffering must be confirmed by at least one independent doctor. Even though George is not a doctor he knew what was best for Lennie in this situation and it as to kill him. All of this concludes that Lennie was too dumb and mentally challenged to make the right decision for his own