On the surface it seems plain enough, a story about a couple of hard luck cases, one of whom is mentally disabled, who end up getting jobs on a ranch in California. It soon becomes clear that the simpleminded Lenny, who is a great ox of a man possessed of tremendous physical strength, has been relying on the other man, George, for quite awhile to help him cope with life. Lenny likes small animals but with his great strength often accidentally kills them (and here we have the first instance of the profound metaphor that dominates the book, for Lenny's ineptitude in taking care of these small animals is seen in the light of the equal ineptitude of either God or fate to provide for Lenny.)
So to go on without giving away too much of the plot for those unfamiliar with the book I will just say that it is this motif - rage at the sheer lack of pity, at the sheer haphazard, arbitrary, and capricious nature of life played out in manifold and interwoven themes - that is what makes up "Of Mice and Men." Steinbeck handles these themes in the stark, minimalist prose, so admired in the mid-twentieth-century with singular mastery. It is clear that he exerted painstaking effort to make every passage resound with understated yet monumental indignation at the plight of mankind (for the people on this ranch are mere microcosms of mankind, caught up in a universal play) in a set of circumstances they are no more in control of then are the mice that Lenny loves and haphazardly destroys.
The book is an extended cry of outrage at the capricious fate we all endure, and at the apparent absence in all the vast universe of any chord to vibrate with a single note of sympathy. Of all the existential works written in the era of existentialism, to me Of Mice and Men stands alone as a work of art.
Brent Hightower
Copyright 2015 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com
