Student Question
What is your favorite part of Of Mice and Men and why?
Quick answer:
Favorite parts of Of Mice and Men include Lennie crushing Curley's hand, which is dramatic and foreshadows later events, and the ending where George is conflicted as he prepares to shoot Lennie. These scenes are impactful because they vividly depict the characters' struggles and relationships, showcasing Steinbeck's ability to evoke strong emotions and highlight the harsh realities of their lives.
When I first read "Of Mice and Men" many years ago the part I liked best was the scene in which Curley's gets his hand crushed by Lennie . It is perhaps the most dramatic episode in the novel. Curley has been looking for trouble and he certainly finds it when he starts picking on Lennie. The description of this fight is so vivid that it makes me suspect that Steinbeck must have seen something like it in real life. The reader is left wondering just how badly Curley's hand has been injured and whether it will ever heal completely. The fact that Lennie can't seem to let go of the hand foreshadows his accidental killing of Curley's wife. Lennie's brain does not connect with his body. If he becomes panicked he forgets about what is happening with his hands, as he does when Curley's wife starts struggling...
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and trying to scream for help in the barn. Reading the novel again after many years, I find other parts that impress me more than Lennie's fight with Curley. The scene in which Lennie accidentally kills Curley's flirtatious wife is very well executed. I also agree with post #2 about the poetic beauty of the opening by the Salinas River. It seems like a very relaxed, comfortable way for a self-confident writer to introduce his two main characters.
Like, bullgatortail, my favorite part of the book is the very end. I think we realize there, as George tells Lennie to look away and tries to level the gun to fire, that Steinbeck has brought us to a powerful moment. In just a few pages, really (this is a short novel) we have come to care about these two people.
We understand the conflict in George, the darkness of the future for both of them whether or not George actually pulls the trigger, and we understand the emotional nature of their lives - provided with only creature comforts, sometimes literally, these men are too soft, too human to live the way they do.
John Steinbeck opens his novella, Of Mice and Men with a poetic description of the beauty of his beloved Salinas Valley. Employing color imagery in his creation of a pastoral tableau that offers a green oasis from the brown dust of the long roads traveled by the bindle stiffs, Steinbeck adds life to this scene with the noiseless hurrying of the rabbits as they hide from the two men who appear on the path through the willows:
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foohill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees--willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter's flooding, and sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool....Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand....And then from the direction of the state highway came the sound of footsteps on crisp sycamore leaves. The rabbits hurried noiselessly for cover.
Interestingly, the peaceful beauty of this passage is repeated in the final chapter also as a symbol of retreat, but in that scene, there is a snake, presaging the tragedy that occurs.
Another magnificently reflective passage comes after Curley's wife has been killed; in this passage, Steinbeck captures the surrealistic sense of moments that seem suspended after a tragic act:
As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.
This passage contains the beauty of biblical-like repetition, a technique that Steinbeck would use in his subsequent novel, The Grapes of Wrath.