Alex Dombrowski

Alex Dombrowski

Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck

Just Right

Just Finished

 

 

1.      The workers are having a horseshoe game while Lennie is sitting alone in the barn. He is petting his dead pup. He killed it by accident; it bit him and then he hit it. Lennie is so strong that hitting the pup killed him. He worried that George will get mad at him for murdering pup and won’t let him tend to the rabbit at the place they are planning to buy. Curley’s wife comes into the barn and starts talking to Lennie. She tells him about how she wanted to be a star. All Lennie wants to talk about is rabbits. She asks him why and he responds by saying he likes to pet soft thing. She tells him how soft her hair is and Lennie proceeds to pet it. Curley’s wife tells him to stop but he gets nervous and won’t let go. She screams, which makes it worse. Lennie tries to shake her to make her stop, but  he ends up breaking her neck because he is so strong. He realizes she is dead and runs away to the “safe place” which is a where that George told him to go if he ever does something bad. All of the workers now want to torture and kill Lennie. George knows what they are going to do to his friend so he goes to the safe place. There he finds Lennie who feels bad about what he did. George understands it was an accident but, has to kill him to prevent the workers from making his death painful. George shoots Lennie in the back of the head so he dies without feeling a thing.

2.      I enjoyed Of Mice and Men. It was a very short book but told a good story. Steinbeck used a lot of foreshadowing with Lennie, It made the book very exciting. I also wanted to know what he would do next. For example when Lennie and Curley first met, Curley didn’t like Lennie because he was big and threated him. This told me that the two would probably to get into a fight. Lennie and George were interesting characters, Lennie was massive but not very bright and George was just an average guy. Steinbeck made them travel together because they were like a family. They were different from the other workers because the others had no family or someone they traveled with.The chemistry George and Lennie had made the book more interesting.

3.      I think the theme is love and sacrifice. I see this in the book when George kills Lennie. Si George and Lennie are like a family, they love each other. After Lennie kills Curley’s wife George knows what the guys are going to do to Lennie so he kills him. sacrifices Lennie out of love because he doesn’t want the workers to make his death painful. Another example of this is when Candy gets his dog put down.. He had the dog for a very long time and he wasn’t in good shape anymore but he still loves him. The rest of the workers don’t like the dog because it smells bad, so they put it down. Love and sacrifice is a common theme in Of Mice and Men.

4.      My favorite character in the novel is Lennie. I like him because he was a very simple character and generally straightforward. Also he is the nicest person at the ranch. Even though he had a tendency to kill things, it is always by accident and he feels bad about it afterwards. Lennie only wants what the other workers want; a nice piece of land of their very own to live on. Sometimes I feel bad for Lennie because he is helpless. He is sheltered by George to keep him out of trouble, it restricted him a lot.

5.      My least favorite character in the novel is Curley. I don’t like him because he is a really nasty man. He is short so anyone larger intimidates him. When he gets intimidated, he tries to fight. As soon as he meets Lennie, he didn’t like him just because he is big. Eventually he gets mad and does fight Lennie. Even Curley’s wife says he is not a nice man. None of the works like Curley because he is so nasty to every. Curley tries to control his wife too. He makes her stay in the house all day.

6.      I am surprised George ended up killing Lennie because I thought they would have just ran away. I didn’t notice anything foreshadowing George killing Lennie. Maybe if Candy had killed his own dog it would have occurred to me that George would kill Lennie, I did expect Lennie to kill Curley’s wife though. There was a lot of foreshadowing leading up to that event. When Lennie killed the mouse and the pup I expected him to kill something else which would cause him to go to the safe spot. However, none of the events in the book prepared me for the way the story ended.