Of Mice and Men

I just finished reading Of Mice and Men with one of my high school classes. I had never read it before and my students had barely read anything before, so it was a perfect fit. It was a great book to learn about the nuances of relationships. It's also great because you have to be a detective-reader and discover those nuances in between the commas, from page to page. Steinbeck is not out to trick you, but he wants to paint a complete picture. And he wants you to look at it.

One source of conflict in the book comes from an emotionally unstable housewife. She is never given a name, though her crude interruptions in the lives of the other characters results in the loss of the American dream. "The bitch" as she came to be called in my class is a walking bundle of loneliness, and her only means of creating her community is through her overdeveloped sexuality. Interestingly, she was the most talked about character in class, though she was one of the least prominent in the narrative. The scene between her and slow-minded Lennie was probably one of the most interesting pieces of dialogue I have read in quite some time. There are two people talking at each other, though it is quite clear they aren't talking to each other. The absolute absurdity of the situation does nothing to mitigate the impending disaster, which makes Steinbeck the undisputed master of contemporary realism . Steinbeck's writing in this scene is sheer brilliance. More than the much-ballyhooed ending, this scene is easily the best in the book. The tragedy is all the more powerful because it is shared evenly between Lennie and Curly's wife, and because their lives are destined to end in this particular circumstance. Lennie's fate is sealed simply because he lives in a world with women. George tries his hardest to create a world where women are all but non-exisistent, but George knows the first time he sees Curly's wife that Lennie's life is in danger. Curly's wife, bitch though she is, was destined to die at the hands of a man, and her tragedy is being trapped on an all-male ranch. It is a destiny she laments to anyone who will listen. I coulda been in pictures, she announces repeatedly, though no one understands the plea behind this ego-driven statement. She has no words to say, "Get me outta here," though she screams it with every fiber of her being. It was inevitable that the two would find each other and end each other.

There is a disturbingly journalistic quality to the portrayal of race relations in this book. Derogatory words are thrown around casually, and Curly's wife's threats to Crooks, the black stable-worker, are depressing to modern readers given their absolute matter-of-factness. Curly's wife lives a nearly powerless existence, yet she takes a perverse joy in tormenting the only person in a worse situation than her. Crooks for his part reminds me of Tiresias, the blind prophet who haunts ancient Greek literature. There is a somber quality to his pronouncements, though he knows how to survive better than anyone else in the text. He knows before anyone else that the American dream they all seek is a mirage. Yet he too finds a way to believe, to see the vision on the hill, if only for a few minutes. And it is at this point that the text reaches its pinnacle, only to plunge downwards a few brushstrokes later.

If you haven't read this book, you should. It is short and beautiful - more beautiful, I think, than any of Steinbeck's other works save perhaps The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck had the courage to go where Twain only hinted at going in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - he took the narrative to its logical conclusion given his understanding of the world. Twain chickens out at the end Huck Finn, bringing in the endlessly Romantic Tom Sawyer to initiate a fantasy conclusion. Steinbeck points to a happy ending and brutally but perhaps necessarily rips it away to reveal it as the fantasy it always was. That is the truth of the American Dream for all but the most fantastic of us all.