Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck (1937)
“A lean, brutal masterpiece about two broke men and one impossible dream — and what happens when the world is designed to crush people like them.”
Character Analysis
Small, quick, pragmatic, perpetually exhausted by the burden of looking after Lennie and perpetually unable to leave him. George's famous speech — 'If I was alone I could live so easy' — is not resentment but grief. He knows exactly what Lennie costs him and stays anyway. In the end, he does the one thing that Lennie cannot do: face the inevitable and end it mercifully. That act destroys something in George that won't come back.
Ranch hand vernacular throughout — dropped g's, contracted syntax — but with a latent sharpness that emerges in anger or self-defense. He's the smartest man in his world and knows it, but has no way to deploy that intelligence except in protecting Lennie.