Essay Of Mice And Men Loneliness

You can be the quarterback of the football team, the school’s shining star, or you could be the water boy on the sidelines; everybody feels lonely sometimes. In John Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men, loneliness is illustrated by the way all of the characters drive to build bonds in order to escape the lonely atmosphere that they are surrounded by. The story takes place on a ranch during the early 1930s. It expresses the difficult lifestyle men had moving from ranch to ranch. Their homes and jobs were only temporary which greatly adds to their loneliness. When on the move, they were alone, which is why they sought to create friendships with one another. The town nearby the ranch is named “Soledad”. Soledad, meaning loneliness in Spanish, simply sums up the characters emotions in this novel. Some characters are lonelier than others, but three major people who portray this feeling are Candy, George and Curley’s wife. One of the loneliest men on the ranch is Candy, a swamper at the ranch. Candy is the oldest man living there and he only has one hand due to an accident that had happened in the past. One day on the ranch, Candy had found that George and Lennie shared the same dream as he. When George brought it up, Candy replied with “S’pose I went with you guys. Tha’s three hundred and fifty bucks I’d put in…how’d that be?” (Steinbeck 59). This …show more content…
Every character is lonely either one way or another, which is why they are driven to build friendships with one another. Whether it be the main characters or not, each one has a gloomy background as if they are stuck in a cloud throughout the whole story. Each chapter they are unable to find a way out of the loneliness. Therefore, it is made clear that the foundation of this novel is that everyone is lonely at times, and it is expressed within the loneliness of all