Of Mice and Men: Summary & Analysis

Beginning

George and Lennie arrive at a ranch near Soledad, California, fleeing their previous job after Lennie frightened a girl by grabbing her dress. They camp the night before starting work, and George repeats the story of the farm they will one day own — a few acres, rabbits for Lennie to tend, independence from bosses. The dream is as much for George's benefit as Lennie's; it gives shape to a life that otherwise has none.

Rising action

At the ranch, the men meet Candy, an aging swamper with one hand and a dying dog; Slim, the respected mule driver; Curley, the boss's aggressive son; and Curley's wife, an isolated young woman with nowhere to belong. Lennie kills a puppy by petting it too hard, then, alone in the barn with Curley's wife, breaks her neck while trying to stop her from screaming after he strokes her hair too roughly. Candy had asked to join George and Lennie's farm plan with his savings, and for a moment the dream seemed within reach.

Ending

When Curley's wife is found dead, Curley organizes a lynch mob to kill Lennie. George finds Lennie first, by the same riverbank where the novella opened, and one last time describes their farm to calm him. As Lennie pictures the rabbits, George shoots him from behind, killing him instantly rather than let the mob torture him. Slim, the only man who understands, leads George away as the others arrive.

George Milton

George is quick-witted, protective and worn down by the responsibility of caring for Lennie, which he resents and cannot abandon. His decision to kill Lennie himself is the story's central act of mercy and its central tragedy: the only kindness left available to him is the one his friendship a moment before made unthinkable.

Lennie Small

Lennie has enormous physical strength paired with an intellectual disability that leaves him unable to control it or to understand the consequences of his actions. He loves soft things — mice, puppies, hair — and his repeated destruction of what he loves drives the plot toward its ending.

Curley's wife

Never given a name, Curley's wife is trapped by her marriage and by a ranch culture that treats her as dangerous simply for being present. Her loneliness, not malice, draws her to talk to Lennie in the barn, with fatal results.

Candy and Crooks

Candy, who loses his dog to a mercy shooting early in the story, foreshadows Lennie's death and represents the fate of anyone used up and discarded by ranch life. Crooks, the Black stable hand who lives segregated from the other men, voices the loneliness underlying the whole ranch and briefly hopes to join the farm dream before withdrawing the offer out of self-protection.

The American Dream as illusion

The farm George and Lennie describe — land, independence, rabbits — is the classic promise of American opportunity, and Steinbeck sets it against a Depression-era world of migrant labor where no one actually escapes it. Candy and Crooks both want in, briefly, which shows how widely shared and how unreachable the dream is.

Loneliness and companionship

Slim observes early on that migrant workers are among the loneliest men in the world because they have no families and no one who cares what happens to them. George and Lennie's friendship is the exception the novella tests to destruction, suggesting that even the strongest bond cannot survive a world built for isolated men.

Fate and inevitability

The novella's circular structure — same clearing, same river, same green pool — signals from the start that Lennie's story will end in violence. Steinbeck's title, drawn from a Robert Burns line about the best-laid plans of mice and men going awry, states the theme directly: intention and hope are no match for circumstance.