John Steinbeck was a compassionate man. That was the one thing that made him such a great writer. He had sympathy for all of his characters in this story and sympathy for the millions of others they represent. His famous contemporaries F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway did not display much sympathy for the little people. Of the foremost American writers, only William Faulkner, in addition to Steinbeck, exhibited sympathy for the poor and downtrodden characters he wrote about. In England there was the great Charles Dickens, and in France there was the great Victor Hugo. In Russia there were Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov.
In Of Mice and Men , I would have to agree with mwestwood and scarletpimpernel who found Crooks the most sympathetic character. He is completely alone and despised by everyone. He is painfully lonely and has no chance of improving his existence in any way...
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because of his physical handicap and his race. The other workers get paid fifty dollars a month, but Crooks probably only gets a small fraction of that amount, if anything. His bunk is a long box filled with straw. Not only that but he suffers pain all the time--and nobody cares.
Curley's wife seems to have the least control over her life of all the characters in the book, so I feel sympathy for her. My greatest sympathy for a character has to go to George though, because he gave up so much for Lennie. He gave up his freedom first and finally gave up a significant and maybe even profound innocence when he shot Lennie in the end.
I am sure everyone sympathizes with George, but I have to put my stake in there. George is trying desperately to make a life for Lennie and himself. No matter what happens, he tries to protect Lennie. When things get bad enough that he can't protect Lennie from himself, he is the one left suffering.
I agree with Post 3 most of all. I think that Curley's wife is the most pitiable figure. Post 5 argues that she has made the choice that has led to her isolation. However, I am not sure she really had more of a choice than Crooks. Crooks could surely have chosen to live and work somewhere where there were other African-Americans. At the same time, women in this time and place did not exactly have lots of options for what they could become.
Crooks at least has his dignity and his space. Curley's wife has none of that. No one respects her at all and she must feel so trapped on that ranch. I feel more sorry for her than for any of the other characters.
Total isolation is one of the worst conditions anyone can suffer. For, as Crooks explains to Lennie, it causes a person to lose his mind:
"I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick."
As he speaks with Lennie, Crooks expresses one of the reasons loneliness and isolation are so distrubing,
"Maybe if he sees somethin', he don't know whether it's right or not. He can't turn to some other guy and ast him if he sees it too. He can't tell. He got nothing to measure by."
While all the other characters suffer the terrible condition of alienation, Crooks suffers the most deprivation of all the men.
My sympathy lies with Curley's wife. As she has no name, she has no identity other than that of her husband. There are no other women on the ranch for her to identify with. She is unable to converse with the men on the ranch because of her husband's jealousy and her own inability to communicate without using her sexuality. There are no friends for her amongst the men: she is referred to as 'jail bait', and 'a tart'. Her cruel husband Curley joins the other men on the trip to the brothel, telling us there relationship is not a solid one. In fact, we find out from her final conversation with Lennie that she finds him 'mean'.
None of Curley's wife's dreams come to fruition. She 'coulda been in pitchers' if the claims of the man in the Riverside dance hall were true, and her mother hadn't hidden her letters, but we get the impression that there was never a hope for Curley's wife, and she dies without seeing her future. Lennie at least believes he will reach his, and George has the opportunity to carry on and start afresh. Curley's wife dies unloved, unknown and unmourned.