Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Predatory Nature of Human Existence
Of Mice and Men teaches a grim lesson
about the nature of human existence. Nearly all of the characters,
including George, Lennie, Candy, Crooks, and Curley’s wife, admit,
at one time or another, to having a profound sense of loneliness
and isolation. Each desires the comfort of a friend, but will settle
for the attentive ear of a stranger. Curley’s wife admits to Candy,
Crooks, and Lennie that she is unhappily married, and Crooks tells
Lennie that life is no good without a companion to turn to in times
of confusion and need. The characters are rendered helpless by their
isolation, and yet, even at their weakest, they seek to destroy
those who are even weaker than they. Perhaps the most powerful example
of this cruel tendency is when Crooks criticizes Lennie’s dream
of the farm and his dependence on George. Having just admitted his
own vulnerabilities—he is a black man with a crooked back who longs
for companionship—Crooks zeroes in on Lennie’s own weaknesses.
In scenes such as this one, Steinbeck records
a profound human truth: oppression does not come only from the hands
of the strong or the powerful. Crooks seems at his strongest when he
has nearly reduced Lennie to tears for fear that something bad has
happened to George, just as Curley’s wife feels most powerful when
she threatens to have Crooks lynched. The novella suggests that the
most visible kind of strength—that used to oppress others—is itself
born of weakness.
Fraternity and the Idealized Male Friendship
One of the reasons that the tragic end of George and Lennie’s
friendship has such a profound impact is that one senses that the
friends have, by the end of the novella, lost a dream larger than
themselves. The farm on which George and Lennie plan to live—a place
that no one ever reaches—has a magnetic quality, as Crooks points
out. After hearing a description of only a few sentences, Candy
is completely drawn in by its magic. Crooks has witnessed countless
men fall under the same silly spell, and still he cannot help but
ask Lennie if he can have a patch of garden to hoe there. The men
in Of Mice and Men desire to come together in a
way that would allow them to be like brothers to one another. That
is, they want to live with one another’s best interests in mind,
to protect each other, and to know that there is someone in the
world dedicated to protecting them. Given the harsh, lonely conditions
under which these men live, it should come as no surprise that they
idealize friendships between men in such a way.
Ultimately, however, the world is too harsh and predatory
a place to sustain such relationships. Lennie and George, who come
closest to achieving this ideal of brotherhood, are forced to separate
tragically. With this, a rare friendship vanishes, but the rest
of the world—represented by Curley and Carlson, who watch George stumble
away with grief from his friend’s dead body—fails to acknowledge
or appreciate it.
The Impossibility of the American Dream
Most of the characters in Of Mice and Men admit,
at one point or another, to dreaming of a different life. Before
her death, Curley’s wife confesses her desire to be a movie star.
Crooks, bitter as he is, allows himself the pleasant fantasy of
hoeing a patch of garden on Lennie’s farm one day, and Candy latches
on desperately to George’s vision of owning a couple of acres. Before
the action of the story begins, circumstances have robbed most of
the characters of these wishes. Curley’s wife, for instance, has
resigned herself to an unfulfilling marriage. What makes all of
these dreams typically American is that the dreamers wish for untarnished
happiness, for the freedom to follow their own desires. George and
Lennie’s dream of owning a farm, which would enable them to sustain
themselves, and, most important, offer them protection from an inhospitable
world, represents a prototypically American ideal. Their journey,
which awakens George to the impossibility of this dream, sadly proves
that the bitter Crooks is right: such paradises of freedom, contentment,
and safety are not to be found in this world.
Fallenness
Drawing on the biblical story of the Fall in which Adam and Eve sin in the Garden of Eden, Of Mice and Men argues that the social and economic world in which its characters live is fundamentally flawed. The novella opens by an Eden-like pool that is presented as a natural paradise. People visit, but they do not own the land and they share its resources amongst themselves, like the giant sycamore whose low branch is “worn smooth by men who have sat on it.” The purity of this world in the opening scene proves to be unsustainable as the story continues. On the ranch, George and Lennie hold on to their idyllic dream of shared farm ownership, and this dream is compared to paradise when Crooks scoffs: “Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’.” George and Lennie’s dream is of a place where “nobody gonna hurt nobody nor steal from ’em.” These paradises—real and imaginary—are contrasted with the ranch, which is owned by Curley’s father and is a place of fear and isolation, a place where the workers get hurt and robbed. This contrast indicates that land-ownership is like Satan’s treachery in the biblical story: it is the act which destroys innocence and paradise. By the time Lennie finds himself back beside the pool, not even the Eden-like qualities of the setting can prevent his death.
