Of Mice And Men

4 Pages 984 Words

Response to Text

I found Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, a difficult book to read. The language was very detailed and the speech was lazy as they left out letters, “You can’t keep a job and you lose me ever’ job I get. Jus’ keep me shovin’ all over the country all the time. An’ that ain’t the worst.” However, by the end of the book I understood the language used and I actually read the book again and picked up a lot of things I first missed.
I was curious about the origins of the title and discovered it was from a line in a Scottish poem-
“The best laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men
Gong aft agley [often go wrong]
And leave us nought but
Grief and Pain
For promised joy.”
I think this means that no matter how well we plan something, sometimes those plans will be just dreams and never become reality, or worse, they could go terribly wrong. I think this is used in the story referring to George and Lennie’s dream of owning a farm.
This dream made George and Lennie’s friendship stronger but I think deep down George knew it was only a dream that would never eventuate. “-I think I knowed from the very first. I think I knowed we’d never do her. He usta like to hear about it so much I got thinking maybe we would.”
Lennie on the other hand, became so obsessed with the idea that it controlled him and became the only thing he thought of.
Lennie might not have been smart, but he was sensitive, strong and had a huge heart. Although Lennie often annoys George with the mind of a child trapped in the body of a man, George does love Lennie and would do nearly anything for him. That is why at time he is so over protective of him.
Steinbeck uses different devices in his writing that became clearer to me the second time I read the book. He uses foreshadowing to introduce the reader to ideas of incidents that become a main part of the story.
At the start of the text, Lennie and George talk about mice and how ...