In the coming weeks a series of articles on learning techniques, revision and preparation for GCSE English Literature and GCSE English examinations will be published. This article focuses on the  themes of the GCSE English Literature text Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck:

Original article sourced from the super teacher resource website Teachkit. Teachkit offer a great selection of free GCSE English and GCSE English Literature notes to help you revise and learn.

The themes of this novella are very clear: one (the fragility of people’s dreams) is indicated in the title. The other themes are friendship, and its opposite, loneliness.

The fragility of dreams

The novella’s title comes from a poem, To a Mouse (on turning her up in her nest with the plough) by the Scots poet Robert Burns (1759-1796):

“The best-laid plans of mice and men
Gang aft agley (=often go wrong).
And leave us naught but grief and pain
For promised joy.”

Burns shows how the plans of men are no more secure than those of the mouse, and this is the point of Steinbeck’s title. The source of the characters’ dreams is their discontent with their present. Steinbeck shows how poor their lifestyle is: they have few possessions, fewer comforts, no chance of marriage or family life and no place of their own.

George’s and Lennie’s dream is at first a whim, but becomes clearer. The unexpected opportunity offered by Candy’s money means it is no longer a fantasy, but the threat to the fulfilment of this dream, ever-present in Lennie’s behaviour finally destroys it, just as it has become possible. Candy and Crooks both try to share in this dream. Candy is desperate and, so, ready to trust his fortune to a near stranger.

Crooks is most cynical about the dream of owning land: “Nobody never gets to heaven and nobody never gets no land”, even though every ranch-hand, he says, has “land in his head”. Yet even he, recalling happy times in his childhood, hopes, briefly, for a share in George’s and Lennie’s dream.

Curley’s wife indulges a different fantasy, far less likely of fulfilment. As many young women do, she aspires to stardom in films. She knows she is pretty, and, believing too readily the man who says she is “a natural”, thinks her talent is merely waiting for an opportunity and that her mother has stolen the letter which represents her chance for fame. Steinbeck describes precisely “the small grand gesture” (an oxymoron or contradiction in terms) with which she demonstrates to Lennie her supposed talent.

The end of the novella seems to confirm Crooks’s pessimistic view. None of the characters does achieve his or her dream. But this seems more due to a lack of opportunity and the way society is organized, than to anything else.

Loneliness and friendship

To the people on the ranch, even the broad-minded Slim, George’s and Lennie’s partnership is very unusual. It is clear that most of them are lonely. Some, like Whit, feel the loneliness and remember wished-for friends with affection. Others learn to be self-sufficient emotionally, or just plain selfish. Crooks insists on his right to be alone even though he dislikes it, while Carlson seems incapable of actually sympathizing with anyone else’s viewpoint. Curley can only communicate through aggression. He marries to impress the men with his sexual prowess and to boast to his wife about how he will give “the ol’ one-two” to his opponents. Slim enjoys respect and a friendly manner, if not actual friendship, from the others on the ranch. He is welcoming and sympathetic to George and Lennie, and forces Carlson to consider Candy’s feelings: he allows the dog to be shot, but Carlson must bury it; Candy should not have to do this. Candy is desperate for companionship, and readily discusses the proposed ranch with Lennie (“I been figurin’ how we can make on them rabbits”) without any sense that Lennie is too simple to follow his conversation.

Crooks astutely notes that Lennie cannot remember what he is saying, but points out that most people in conversation do this, that being with another is what counts; and so he talks freely to Lennie, who has the same effect on Curley’s wife. She cannot speak to her husband but pours out her troubles to Lennie. It is ironic that the retarded man should be taken into the confidence of these supposedly normal characters. It is unfortunate that the rare relationship of friends should be ended by one of them; in killing Lennie, George knows (and tells Candy) he is condemning himself to the life of working for a month, then blowing his pay in the pool-room and “lousy cat-house”. And the detailed references to the two brothels in Soledad remind us both of the lack of opportunity for the ranch-hands to have a lasting sexual relationship, and the absence of opportunities for women to work in respectable jobs.

We hope this article helps with your GCSE English Literature revision. Be sure to check out the LearnThruMusic learning song “The American Dream” Of Mice and Men

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