“Of Mice and Men” is a story based around George Milton and Lennie Small’s quest for work in the hard times of the Great Depression. Together they work on a farm doing hard manual labor trying to save enough money to buy a ranch and start anew. John Steinbeck uses his diverse characters, gloomy setting, and plot to develop the central idea of “trust is both a precious and dangerous thing.”
The characters are used throughout the story to show the theme of “trust” when all of the workers think that Lennie and George are up to something because they are friends and depend on one another. This is something so odd to the workers because they are always watching their backs, and as a result live in brutal isolation, one worker named Slim even says, “Slim looked through George and beyond him. ‘Ain't many guys travel around together,’ he mused. ‘I don't know why. Maybe ever'body in the whole [dang] world is scared of each other." Later in the story another worker says, “I …show more content…
When Lennie enters the farmhand’s room, he is surprised to be greeted by a very hostile man named Crooks, who trusts no one so stays in his room in order to not get hurt, the text says,”Lennie smiled helplessly in an attempt to make friends. Crooks said sharply, "You got no right to come in my room. This here's my room. Nobody got any right in here but me." This means that he has been backstabbed so much that he takes refuge in his pitiful room, it is later revealed all he ended up wanting was a friend he could trust. A final way the theme is illustrated through theme is through the very name of the city in which the whole story takes place, “Soledad.” The word soledad means solitude or isolation, this is symbolic of how everyone in the story is kept in isolation due to trust issues and fear of being hurt, something that has become very evident throughout the
The characters are used throughout the story to show the theme of “trust” when all of the workers think that Lennie and George are up to something because they are friends and depend on one another. This is something so odd to the workers because they are always watching their backs, and as a result live in brutal isolation, one worker named Slim even says, “Slim looked through George and beyond him. ‘Ain't many guys travel around together,’ he mused. ‘I don't know why. Maybe ever'body in the whole [dang] world is scared of each other." Later in the story another worker says, “I …show more content…
When Lennie enters the farmhand’s room, he is surprised to be greeted by a very hostile man named Crooks, who trusts no one so stays in his room in order to not get hurt, the text says,”Lennie smiled helplessly in an attempt to make friends. Crooks said sharply, "You got no right to come in my room. This here's my room. Nobody got any right in here but me." This means that he has been backstabbed so much that he takes refuge in his pitiful room, it is later revealed all he ended up wanting was a friend he could trust. A final way the theme is illustrated through theme is through the very name of the city in which the whole story takes place, “Soledad.” The word soledad means solitude or isolation, this is symbolic of how everyone in the story is kept in isolation due to trust issues and fear of being hurt, something that has become very evident throughout the