Theme Of Fate In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

She hears her children screaming in the back of the car. Her husband besides her yelling at her because she made a wrong turn. She tells the kids to be quiet so she can listen to her husband who is trying to get them back to the highway. It is late. Pitch black darkness surrounding them. She turns on the radio hoping to hear some music to distract her from the chaos around her, but instead she hears about a fatal five car collision on the highway they are headed to. She thinks about where they would have been on the highway and comes to the realization that she and her whole family would have been in the middle of the crash. She says nothing, but instead she thinks about her wrong turn and wonders what kept her whole family from the gates of …show more content…
On the surface, the story is about a group of men facing difficult times at a ranch, trying to make a living and have the perfect American dream. After the curtain is pulled away, all of the deeper meanings are waiting to be discovered. The main point of the novel is that you cannot run from fate forever, sure man can escape a close call a few times but eventually fate will catch up. Look deeper into different styles of literature and a common theme will jump out in the poem To a Mouse by Robert Burns. Robert Burns wrote, “The best laid schemes of mice and men go often askew…” (Burns 39-40), by saying this he is showing that no matter how much planning you put into your actions it doesn’t mean it will happen. The Filmmaker Lasse Hallström also dove deep into the idea of fate in his movie What’s Eating Gilbert Grape by portraying the character Momma as a burden. She is one of the few people or characters that accepted their fate as it would happen. Can fate be changed or shifted by man’s actions? The answer is simply no. Fate is concrete; never changed or moved or shifted and if man destroys part of his fate it creates even more difficulty in life and rubble to clean …show more content…
His entire poem bases off of the fact that man can plan and be as prepared as humanly possible but things still may not go the way that man had hoped. Ultimately, fate is decided for everyone right when they are born and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. Postpone it, maybe, but not prevent. Later in the poem Burns looks “forward [into the future], though [he] cannot see, [he] guess[es] and fear[s]” (Burns 47-48). This is exactly what George does in Of Mice and Men because he knows that Lennie will do a bad thing again and he is just waiting. Waiting and fearing for Lennie’s life. George has no idea about what will happen in the future, but he can guess and the thought of Lennie dying makes George fearful of the future and fearful that he will lose his best