Of the great religions, Manicheism generates the most suspense. In it, the contending principles of good and evil, God and Satan, light and darkness, soul and body are so evenly matched that for long periods darkness is actually triumphant over light. In Christianity, the rebellious angels rise up but are easily defeated in battle and contemptuously cast down into hell. One never gets the impression that Satan is a serious threat to God or that he has any real chance of prevailing. In Manicheism, he is not only a serious threat but for a time he actually does prevail. When God sends his agent, Primal Man, to put down darkness, Primal Man is defeated in battle and taken prisoner. Particles of light are captured by the nether forces and the realm of light itself driven back. (p. 11)

For self-evident reasons, Manicheism was branded as a heresy by other religions. But for a thousand years, from the third through the thirteenth centuries, it spread westward from Persia and exercised a pervasive and profound influence on Europe. Augustine himself was a Manichean for nine years before turning Christian. The emphasis of Manicheism on the power of fertility of darkness seemed closer to the facts of human experience than the more cheerful, perhaps even complacent mythology of other creeds. This may be one reason why it did not finally survive: its cosmology was too tragic and dangerous, its sexual demands too severe. But while not ultimately satisfactory, or satisfying, as religion, Manicheism is marvelously suited to drama. Nothing is more dramatic than a contest between two combatants of perfectly balanced strength, especially if the cosmos itself is divided between them. And it is on the dramatic side that Manicheism has made its appeal to modern literature. (p. 12)

The Manichean element … is visible in Steinbeck's work from the start, but it is not until Of Mice and Men, written when Steinbeck was at the height of his powers, that it becomes paramount. This celebrated little novel, wedged between In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath, wonderfully reveals Steinbeck in his Manichean aspect.

The antagonists appear at once, and embody the warring Manichean principles of mind and body. They are of course George and Lennie, locked together in the same life process but ultimately irreconcilable, with one compelled to slay the other…. They are ranch hands, working the earth. They are also itinerants, involved not with a particular plot of ground but with everywhere. Even their dream of owning their own place has this omnipresent quality: it starts out as something in the sky, the pure product of their eager imaginations, then comes down to a specific section of ground with a previous owner and a price tag. The dream is both ideal and real—it extends over all the available ground. This element of universality, at once abstract and concrete, is one of the story's special qualities.

While George and Lennie are thus deeply joined, they are also profoundly separated…. George has a small body and a big brain, Lennie has a huge physique and a tiny brain. These deliberate polarities strain our belief in them as individual figures, but are absolutely necessary to establish them as reigning forces in the Manichean struggle for the world. The paradox of their existence is that they are at once partners and enemies. They strive for the same goal while destined by their natures to split apart. It is a paradox that lies both at the heart of the novel and Steinbeck's vision of the cosmos.

Sex, embodied in Curley's wife, is associated with what she calls "the big guy," i.e. Lennie. George seems apart from it, and even when he speaks of going to a brothel, he has as little interest in it as getting drunk. George is sober, chaste, almost monastic in his habits. Lennie, in contrast, is uncontrollably sensuous. His whole being seems concentrated in his hands. He doesn't see anything very clearly, being a creature of darkness; touch is the focus of his energies…. But his touch is deadly, and in the end he kills everything he touches. He doesn't mean to; his actions derive not from any centre of moral or psychological individuality but from his existence as a mindless, overwhelming force. As a force, he draws no distinction between life and death. He extracts as much pleasure in stroking a dead mouse as a live one.

Despite their radical dissimilarity, George feels obligated to "save" Lennie. In this he has a sense of almost religious mission. He grumbles about it throughout the novel. He is forever ragging Lennie about what a nuisance he is and how much happier he, George, would be if he could somehow be rid of him. But all this is on the surface. George feels deeply compelled to control Lennie…. And George has his hands full throughout. Lennie is his charge but also an immense counterweight pulling him constantly toward destruction…. Life with Lennie is complicated and dangerous; it can all blow up at any moment, and it is not just their jobs and their livelihood that are at stake, but their lives. The novel, in its immediate as well as larger implications, is literally a matter of life and death.

The cosmological element is further highlighted by the fact that both George and Lennie are killers. They assume the right to impose death as though they were gods, and this raises them beyond the mortal. George is conscious and calculating, so he shoots Lennie consciously and calculatingly. Lennie is spontaneous and irrational, so he kills mice, puppies, rabbits, and Curley's wife unintentionally and irrationally. These awesome acts are the same for each; they flow naturally and quite unimpededly from the center of their beings. Steinbeck's approach to them, persistent throughout his work, is to establish their surface authenticity, pass over and indeed deliberately ignore their psychological insides, and settle finally upon their role as forces in nature. Readers who demand attention to the psychological contours of the individual self, who regard the characterization developed so magnificently in the nineteenth-century novel as the norm of fiction, will inevitably find Of Mice and Men sentimental and pretentious: sentimental because it arouses emotions and emotional responses too large for the simply drawn characters to sustain; pretentious because it imposes upon a pair of ragged, marginal itinerant laborers, one of whom is a virtual idiot, the tragic struggle of nothing less than the universe itself.

If, however, Steinbeck's source is not the modern novel but the ancient parable—or the early epic, which is a kind of large-framed, fleshed-out parable—Of Mice and Men can be read as a peculiarly contemporary example of the genre. It is Steinbeck's Manichean parable, as The Grapes of Wrath, following it immediately in order of composition, is his Christian one. But the parable, while it eschews psychological embroidery and complexity of characterization, depends very much on surface credibility, on the authentic rendering of appearance, gesture, and word. And here even his harshest critics must concede Steinbeck's mastery. His ranch hands, whether communing in the bunkhouse or sweating in the field, look, sound, feel, even smell like what they are supposed to be. Their dialogue, credible enough in terms of grammatical construction, elision, monosyllabic diction, and colloquial nuance, is entirely free of any trace of abstraction, of that tendency to abandon the physical for the metaphysical that has tainted so much "uneducated" speech and dialect from Wordsworth to [William] Saroyan.

Even the refrain—the most formal device in evidence here—suggests the epic. At Lennie's urging, George recites the tale of their Promised Land: the little farm they will own some day…. Like an ancient scop or medieval troubadour, George relates this beautiful dream as though it were a chant or an orision…. He has a rapt audience of one, Lennie, sometimes two, Lennie and Candy. Like a congregation caught up in ritual prayer, Lennie breaks in at set intervals with his own aria…. The effect of all this—the chant, the dream, the repetitious rhythm, the enraptured teller and his spellbound audience lifted ecstatically out of themselves—is to blur the individual moment and universalize the event. The impression conveyed is that this sort of thing has been going on, in no very different terms, since the beginning of time. Even Of Mice and Men's original title, "Something That Happened," strengthens this impression by its deliberately toneless and impersonal anonymity.

The movement from the particular to the general is accelerated by Steinbeck's well-advertised intention of constructing his story like a play. Description is condensed. The cast of characters is stripped to its minimal impulses. Elaboration of any kind is foregone. The six separate chapters are treated as though they were acts on stage: related to one another, to be sure, in terms of advancing movement, but deliberately fashioned as autonomous, self-contained units with an existence of their own as distinct from their existence in the novel as a whole. They are divided neatly into three locales: chapters one and six take place by the river, two and three in the bunkhouse, four and five in the barn. This 1 2-2 3-3 1 arrangement is designed for concentration—each locale appears twice—and for climax: the return at the end to the scene of the beginning. In its simplicity, leanness, and brevity, it seeks to reduce everything to essentials, even to quintessentials. There is no room for commentary or nuance, none for the intricate machinery of the modern novel. Steinbeck's instinct has always been for a return to early forms of literature: the drama, the epic, and the parable. Of Mice and Men is his supreme combination of all these.

The lighting scheme of the novel supports its dramatic intentions. The prevailing atmosphere is a half-light shading toward darkness, precisely suited to the Manichean setting where the agents of God are always descending to do battle with the dark forces. (pp. 14-18)

Chapter five takes place during the afternoon in the main section of the barn. "The afternoon sun sliced in through the cracks of the barn walls and lay in bright lines on the hay." Lennie has left George, left Crooks, and is now alone with the animals in the subhuman world of the stable. Here, with the light and darkness splintered into alternating strips, the murder of Curley's wife triggers the sombre tragedy of the final chapter. Her unpremeditated death leads to the premeditated death of Lennie, back in the outer air by the river. The refrain motif of the story reaches its chromatic climax with the falling afternoon light on the last scene, on its way to completing the circle that began at the same point with the falling light on the opening pages. It is the interpenetration of light and dark, with each given an exactly similar weight and place with the other, that powerfully reinforces the Manichean idea that these contending cosmic forces are, until all but the very end of their struggle, of equal strength. (pp. 18-19)

[The] supporting characters in Of Mice and Men are a grab bag of the ordinary human world, the world which is in Mani's terms the final scene of the cosmological conflict. The elements in each are deliberately mixed. Curley's wife is the Manichean Eve, the purely sexual temptress who brings nothing but trouble to the surrounding males. But she is humanized by her unhappiness…. Curley himself seems wholly a creature of darkness, a vicious stunted figure seeking to compensate for his lack of sexual potency by training himself as a boxer and beating up helpless men bigger than himself. Yet he, too, is emotionally vulnerable, humanized in turn by his abnormal capacity to feel pain, by his feverishly hypersensitive reaction to those around him.

Each of the others bears within himself some splinter of light…. There is one figure who approaches an ideal standard: Slim, the expert muleskinner, the supremely skilful workingman, invested with superhuman qualities. Yet if he is a god, he is a curiously ineffectual one, commenting on events but unable to control or channel them. He is a sympathetic judge of George's dilemma. "You hadda, George. I swear you hadda," he comforts him at the end, but he is quite unable to prevent anyone from doing what his nature compels him to.

The moral equations are similarly mixed. In the novel, virtue nearly always leads to disaster. Lennie loves puppies and mice, but succeeds only in killing them. Candy's faithful attachment to his old dog leaves him in a state of shock and grief at its death. George's feelings for Lennie, an intricate amalgam of brother, father, and keeper, force him to slay his friend. There is an impersonality, an inevitability about these poignant events that reflects the character of the larger world in which they occur. That larger world joins light and darkness at their points of maximum interfusion. On the human level, the novel joins the redeeming emotion and the tragic action at exactly the same point, the moment when they meld into one another with maximum force.

Perhaps the most suggestive dualism of the novel is its contrast between men who travel together and those who travel alone. There are many more of the second than the first. Those who travel together are indeed so rare that they arouse comment. (pp. 19-21)

All the loners are drawn to the pair that are together…. This theme of human beings who are linked and those who are atomized, like the other themes of the novel, subtly underlines its Manichean character. The dark, psychologically disturbed figures—Curley, Curley's wife, Crooks—are drawn into Lennie's orbit. The one man drawn to George is Slim, endowed throughout with godlike attributes…. (p. 21)

Underlying the novel, and controlling it, is Steinbeck's vision of the universe as the scene of a decisive and unpredictable encounter of immense forces. It is this vision that gives Of Mice and Men its quality as a parable, makes it seem larger than the life it describes, and frees the characters from the sentimentality into which they would obviously sink if taken on their own literal, limitedly human terms. And the vision is essentially Manichean. Lennie and George are fated by their very natures to be joined in extraordinary intimacy and irreconcilable hostility. Moreover, the darkness represented by Lennie is just as "creative" and potent as George's light. George may be the executor of the dream, but it is Lennie who conceives it. It is George's incantatory voice that gives it verbal shape, but it is Lennie whom it lifts to ecstatic heights. And the dependence of one upon the other is total in both human and cosmic terms. Lennie and George are indispensable to one another as Manichean darkness and light are, and in exactly the same way.

It is true of Steinbeck … that Manichean psychology and drama are separated from its ethics and theology. The good-bad sides of God and Satan, the ultimate triumph of one over the other, an apocalyptic event accompanied by the dissolution of human history, are of little interest to [him. He concentrates] instead on what is visible and verifiable: The contending forces govern and shape our destinies. Both are equally potent and powerful sources of life. They are indispensable to one another while remaining irreconcilable, and the outcome of their perpetual combat is beyond prediction.

Of these ideas and visions, Of Mice and Men—lean, small-boned, delicately framed—is a supple and effective embodiment. (pp. 21-2)