Of Mice and Men — themes, structure, and the American dream broken

John Steinbeck · 1937

John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is a short book — roughly 30,000 words — built like a play. Six chapters, each set in a single location, each opening with a description that reads like a stage direction. Steinbeck wrote it deliberately to be adaptable to the stage, and the structural decision shapes every page: the novella's compression, its claustrophobia, and its sense of inevitability are all consequences of its theatrical architecture.

The structure: novella as play

Each of the six chapters opens with a panoramic description of its setting — the riverbank, the bunkhouse, the harness room, Crooks's room, the barn, the riverbank again. These openings function as stage directions. Once the setting is established, the chapter is almost entirely dialogue, with characters entering and exiting as if cued. The novella was successfully adapted to the stage in 1937 with minimal changes, because the material was already shaped for performance.

The form has thematic consequences. Each setting is closed, small, and overlooked by larger powers (the boss, the wider ranch economy). George and Lennie can never escape into the American landscape; the landscape is always already a stage on which their performance plays out.

The dream as recurring motif

George and Lennie's shared dream — a little house with a plot of land, rabbits, "the fatta the lan'" — is the novella's central recurring motif. The dream is repeated almost ritually throughout the book, often at moments of stress:

The opening campfire scene, where George recites the dream to soothe Lennie.
The bunkhouse scene where Candy overhears and buys his way in.
The barn scene where Crooks first mocks the dream, then asks to join.
The final scene by the river, where George recites the dream one last time as a kindness before the killing.

The repetition makes the dream feel achievable, then progressively less so, then finally impossible. The structure of the novella is the structure of the dream's defeat.

Foreshadowing as design

Almost every event in the book is foreshadowed. Foreshadowing in Steinbeck is not subtle — it is part of the inevitability the novella is building:

Lennie kills the mouse in chapter one. He will kill the puppy. He will kill Curley's wife.
Candy's dog is shot in the back of the head by Carlson — "He won't even feel it." Lennie will be shot in the back of the head by George.
George says, of the dream, "I never seen no piece of land yet" — he never will.
The opening riverbank scene returns as the closing setting, framing the entire novella inside one loop.

The foreshadowing is so insistent that the ending is no surprise. The book's argument is not what will happen but how — and what that how reveals about the social order it depicts.

The characters as types

Each major character represents a kind of social marginality the Depression-era economy refused to accommodate:

George — the small-stature wage laborer whose only asset is his mobility. He cannot accumulate anything because he must always move to the next job.
Lennie — the intellectually disabled. Strong, gentle, unable to control his strength, and (in the play's logic) unable to survive in a world that has no place for him.
Candy — the aging worker, soon to be discarded. His dog's killing prefigures his own coming obsolescence.
Crooks — the Black ranch hand, segregated to the harness room. His isolation is the novella's sharpest single image of racial caste.
Curley's wife — unnamed, defined entirely by her relationship to a man, dangerous because her sexuality is the only currency she has.
Slim — the prince of the ranch, the only character with full social standing. The novella's moral arbiter, who alone fully understands what George has done in the final scene.

Each is at the margin of a different fault line — class, ability, race, gender, age. Steinbeck's argument is that the ranch economy systematically excludes the people the dream is supposed to be available to.

The title

The title comes from Robert Burns's poem "To a Mouse" (1785): "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley" — the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. The allusion is structural. The book is a sustained argument that the plans George and Lennie make are mouse-scale plans in a landscape too large and indifferent to honour them.

The ending

George's killing of Lennie is the novella's tragic conclusion and its act of love at once. Steinbeck stages it carefully: he gives George the same words and gestures Carlson used on Candy's dog (a shot to the back of the head, while the victim is distracted), so that the parallel is unmistakable. George recites the dream one final time as Lennie listens. The reader is asked to register that this killing is mercy — that what Lennie escapes is worse than what George gives him.

The book ends with Slim taking George for a drink, and Carlson asking what's eating those two guys. The novella's last beat is the world's incomprehension. Slim understands; the others do not; the system continues; the dream is gone.

Try Lexio

Look up any word like this — in any book, in any browser.

Lexio is a free Chrome extension and web app that reads a word's actual context and tells you what it means in this sentence, not from a generic dictionary.

Try Lexio — free →