What do we learn about the hopes and dreams of the characters in the novella, “Of Mice and Men”?
In your answer you should look at:
- the reasons why the characters have hopes and dreams
- what they dream of
- whether their hopes and dreams are ever likely to come true
You can tell before you read the novella that it will be about crushed hopes and dreams. This is because the title is taken from a poem called “To a Mouse” by Robert Burns, which is about how humans and little mice alike all plan and hope for their futures, only to have their hopes dashed by cruel fate. In the case of the poem, it is a little mouse who builds himself a home to protect himself from the winter, but unfortunately the farmer destroys it with his plough. The key lines of the poem are:
“The best laid schemes o’ mice and men
Gang aft agley”
Burns is saying that, just like the little mouse, humans find often their own plans and hopes destroyed.
Many of the characters have hopes and dreams that will not come true. The main dream of the novella is the dream of owning a ranch (otherwise known as the American Dream). Itinerant travellers like George and Lennie harbour this dream because of the lives they have to lead. They live in rural California in the 1930s, the time of the Great Depression. Businesses were failing and there was harsh poverty and long-term unemployment. Men like George and Lennie had to travel from ranch to ranch to find temporary work. This was poorly paid but it was the only type of work available to them. George is smart enough to realise he is being exploited and tells us that one of the reasons why he wants his own ranch is that:
“There would be no more runnin’ round the country and getting’ fed by a Jap cook… We wouldn’t have to buck no barley eleven hours a day.” (page 63)
He is also aware that by travelling round alone (or with just Lennie in tow) that he has lost control of his life, something his own ranch would give him:
“An’ it’d be our own, an’ nobody could can us. If we don’t like a guy we can say, “Get the hell out,” and by God he’s got to do it. An’ if a fren’ come along, why we’d have an extra bunk” (Page 64)
More than anything, owning his own ranch would give George a feeling of self-sufficiency and independence; a sense that he could reap (quite literally!) the rewards of his own hard efforts:
“An’ when we put in a crop, why, we’d be there to take the crop up. We’d know what came of our planting.” (Page 63)
George paints a warm romantic picture of life on his dream ranch, with images such as “cream so god damn thick you got to cut it with a knife”. It’s also clear he misses the security and happiness of a past life when he talks of how he will build “a smoke house like the one gran’pa had” and “we’d keep a few pigeons to go flyin’ around the win’mill like they done when I was a kid”. These nostalgic images provide colour and warmth in a dull and difficult life where there is no real hope of change.
It is sometimes hard to tell whether George believes in his dream or not. There is some evidence that, as a smart man, he doesn’t. One very obvious example is when he and Lennie are at the poolside before they go to the ranch. George is indulging Lennie by repeating the dream but he suddenly breaks off with the word “Nuts!” and we are told how he “drove his knife through the top of one of the beans can” (page 16) as if he is annoyed with himself for momentarily believing. I think though that even he begins truly to believe that the Dream could come true when he realises that Candy could give them the financial backing that they need. At this point he breaks out with a rapturous:
“‘Jesus Christ! I bet we could swing her.’” (Pages 65-6)
We are told that his eyes were full of “wonder” as if for the first time the dream has become a possibility.
The dream of course disappears for George with the death of his friend, Lennie. Maybe Lennie’s death simply opened his eyes to the fact that the ranch was always “pie in the sky”, even with Candy’s additional $250. The fact is that even though the owners are “flat bust” and the “ol’ lady needs an operation”, there are hundreds of other people with George’s desire to buy their own free-holding and, for all George knows, the ranch could be sold already. As Crooks tells Lennie, he has seen “hundreds of men come by… an’ every damn one of ‘em’s got a little piece of land in his head” (Page 81).
Lennie’s dream is the child’s version of George’s dream. He wants safety from the places he feels threatened by (“I don’ like this place, George. This ain’t no good place.” Page 36) and he wants to indulge his overwhelming urge for the emotional fulfilment he finds in caressing soft creatures like rabbits (like a small child with a blanket or a favourite toy). Lennie is particular in what he wants:
“Furry ones” (Page 17)
There will, of course, be rabbits on the dream ranch for Lennie to “pet”, according to George’s active imagination. Lennie does believe in the dream because he has not the mental capacity to question it; also he trusts and believes every word George says to him. Despite this, even he is very vague about when the dream will come true and when he will find his heaven on earth, always referring to it, as George does, as something in the undefined future.
Candy gets sucked into the ranch dream, even though he is too old to share George’s pioneering aspirations. To Candy, the ranch represents a few things. The first is obviously dignity in his old age. His abject fear is ofbeing “canned” and having nowhere to go. He feels this so strongly that he cries out at one point:
“When they can me here I wisht somebody’d shoot me” (Page 66)
Living with George and Lennie in relative comfort would obviously provide him with a safe environment. His sense of self respect would be kept intact by the thought that, even though he cannot do his share of hard physical labour, he can reassure himself that without him and his financial backing, George and Lennie could not have come to live in the ranch at all.
The ranch also represents companionship to Candy. His lifelong companion, his dog, has been shot and he speaks of how much this dog has meant to him:
“Had him since he was a pup. I herded sheep with him” (Page 49)
The importance of the dog to him cannot be understated; indeed it is easy to draw parallels between the affection that Candy had for his long-term companion and the feelings George has for Lennie. On his ranch, Candy at least would know the companionship of two men sympathetic to his needs and prepared to give him their friendship. He speaks of their relationship with pride to Curley’s Wife:
“we got fren’s, that’s what we got” (Page 87)
Pathos is created around the character of old Candy at the end when Lennie kills Curley’s Wife and the realisation that George will no longer want to pursue the dream without his companion is referred to as Candy’s “greatest fear” (Page 103). The last we see of him is his symbolic “death” in the barn:
“Old Candy lay down in the hay and covered his eyes with his arms.” (Page 108)
Even unsympathetic characters like Curley have dreams. Curley has far more than George, Lennie and Candy have in that he is the boss’s son and will one day run the ranch himself. Curley’s problem is that he cannot understand why it is that characters like Slim, who has a supervisory role on the ranch, can command respect and he can’t. He puts it down to being small himself:
“he hates big guys … Kind of like he’s mad at ‘em because he ain’t a big guy” (Page 29)
He believes that he can win respect by his bullying aggressive attitude and wears the trappings of his power in the form of high boots with studs on. This does not however win him the respect that he craves, as even old Candy sees through his attempt at show and sneers at it:
“Slim don’t need to wear no high heeled boots” (page 31)
Candy is a trained boxer and believes that another way to win respect is through picking fights with bigger men. He lives this dream constantly, as Curley’s Wife tells us:
“Spends all his time sayin’ what he’s gonna do to guys he don’t like, and he don’t like nobody.” (Page 85)
He judges his targets carefully though, avoiding characters like Carlson or Slim, and picking on Lennie, whom he judges to be too slow to beat him. Ironically, this backfires on him badly, as the men are disgusted by his dirty tactics (Slim calls him a “dirty rat” and threatens to “get ‘um myself” Page 69) and all support George and Lennie afterwards when George fears they will be canned.
Curley’s dream will not come true unless he realises that bullies don’t win respect. He needs to take a leaf out of Slim’s book. Slim gets his hands dirty in the field with his men; he is a “master craftsman” and “a jerkline skinner, the prince of the ranch”. Not only this, but he listens to people when they speak to him and shows them respect (unlike Curley and his father, he does not mistrust George’s relationship with Lennie and encourages him to talk about it). He is fair and kind and he has a natural presence that, even with all the boxing skills in the world, Curley couldn’t emulate. While Curley thinks that all Slim has got over him is that he is “big” (he’s called “tall man” on page 36), he will never make his dream of respect come true.
Curley’s Wife’s dream is about attention. This is why she wants to be a Hollywood movie star. She fell, foolishly and naively for the silver tongued words of a supposed Hollywood director and when his letter never arrived, she believed “my ol’ lady stole it”. Marrying Curley to punish her mother, she has – ironically – found herself in a place where she gets less attention than ever. Incredibly she has only been married a couple of weeks and Curley pays her precious little attention (because he’s too busy honing his boxing skills and dreaming about annihilating his next victim) and she has learnt already that Curley “ain’t a nice fella” (Page 97). The fact that we never learn her name and that she is only ever referred to as “Curley’s Wife” stresses how insignificant she is in this world on the ranch she lives. She dresses inappropriately for the ranch (in heavy make up and quite glamorous clothing) and her apparently flirtatious manner lead the inexperienced ranch hands to believe that she might be giving them “the eye”. Consequently, the men avoid her, fearing that she spells trouble for them. The more they tell her that they don’t want her hanging around their bunkhouse the more she does, as if desperately, childishly she believes that the harder she tries the more chance there is that she can get them to look at her and give her the attention she craves. Despite marriage to Curley, she has not given up on her Hollywood dreams as she tells Lennie:
“I coulda made somethin’ of myself … Maybe I will yet” (Page 96)
Ironically, it is her attention seeking that brings about her destruction in the end. She forces herself on Lennie (despite his protestations as he remembers George’s warnings about keeping out of her way), seeing in him, as Crooks did, a good listener.
Curley’s Wife’s Hollywood dream is obviously as far-fetched as the dream-ranch. She is an ordinarily pretty girl: in death she is described as “pretty and simple … her face sweet and young” (Page 101). However, she obviously had no special talents that were ever going to win her stardom. You could say that her dream for attention was not so unrealistic, but in the world that she has chosen to move into (with a brute of a husband and misanthropic ranch hands), she has closed down all chances of achieving this.
Crooks’ dream is also what you might call a simple one. He wants to be accepted in a world that is intolerant of blacks. This is 1930s USA and, although slavery had been abolished in the previous century, there was no doubt that black people were regarded as third class citizens. Crooks’ isolation is exacerbated by the fact that his family is one of very few families that live in California. Many would still live in the southern states where their roots were. Now Crooks is just about tolerated on the ranch. The men allow him to play horse shoes with them (apparently he’s very good), but he is not allowed in their bunkhouse and the Boss takes his anger out on him. Consequently, Crooks is desperately lonely, and he talks about the drastic effects of this loneliness:
“I tell ya a guy gets too lonely and he gets sick” (Page 80)
We are told he “whined” these words, which is rather shocking as Crooks is a man’s man and would look down on someone who whined. He has become hardened and cynical, repaying the white men for their cruelty by banning them from his room too. He gets sucked into the Ranch dream, against his better judgement, because he is hypnotised by the magic of the night when two white men come to his room and apparently offer him companionship. Accepting this to be real, he allows himself to hope and dream for more and momentarily lets his guard down when he tentatively asks Candy and Lennie;
“If you … guys would want a hand to work for nothing – just his keep, why I’d come and lend a hand” (Page 84)
Ironically, it is almost at that very minute that the person arrives who will smash his dream to pieces. Curley’s Wife does this by reminding him who he is and that, powerless though she is in a male dominated world, she still has more power than a black man:
“I could get you strung up on a tree so easy it ain’t even funny” (Pages 88-9 )
Crooks knows this is true and it is this powerful reminder that makes him remember himself and withdraw his offer to be part of the ranch dream.
Crooks’ position is sad because it is in no way of his own making; he lives in a time and a place where there is no tolerance of his colour or sympathetic understanding of what it feels like to be a victim of racial abuse. He has no chance of achieving his dream and can only fall back on his own pride and aloofness as defence mechanisms against the cruelty of life.