Comparing George And Lennie In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

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Of Mice and Men is a classic novella, written by John Steinbeck and published in 1937. The novella is about two friends, George and Lennie, who work on ranches for a living, moving around the country. George is small and clever, while Lennie is large and mentally handicapped. Even with these colossal differences, George and Lennie are best friends and travel together while working, which is not common in ranch workers at the time. During the novella, the two friends work at a ranch near Salinas, California. Lennie is known for accidentally killing small things in his hands, like mice. George always says that his life would be much easier if he didn’t have to watch after Lennie. George and Lennie have a dream to collect enough money working …show more content…
Upon arriving the ranch to work, George and Lennie are looked at as different because of their friendship. Curley, the boss’s son, immediately doesn’t like Lennie, because Curley is small and he is jealous of his size. Eventually, Curley starts a fight with Lennie, and Lennie crushes Curley’s hand into pieces. Curley’s wife is a lonely, flirtatious women who is always trying to talk to the ranchers. By the end of the novella, Lennie accidentally kills one of the puppies on the ranch, and when Curley’s wife tries to comfort him, he kills her when she lets him rub her hair and he rubs to hard, panicking when she struggles. Lennie goes to the safe place after leaving her body, and Curley plans to have him lynched for killing her. George decides to take matters into his own hands by killing Lennie before he would be killed by Curley. George’s decision to kill Lennie at the end of the novella was justified, because of the torture that Lennie would have been put through if Curley got to kill him, the trouble that Lennie had caused George in his life, and the fact that George didn’t want anybody to suspect that he was in on the murder of Curley’s