Of Mice and Men 1015and sexual, were just as aroused as he was. This
started Casy on a long process of spiritual question-
ing, which ends with his realization that true spiri-
tual life has nothing to do with Jesus (in whom Casy
ceases to believe) and everything to do with feeling
love for other people.
However, this too is inadequate, in that Casy
feels this love must be relevant to real life. He
finds this purpose when the poor migrant people
he loves begin to feel the hard oppression of the
establishment, whose actions Casy realizes can only
be labeled as sin and evil on a scale larger than any-
thing he has ever conceived in the past. Tellingly,
when Grandpa Joad is dying, Casy says the Lord’s
Prayer and stops right before the clause that asks
God to forgive us for our sins; the implication is
that religion has foisted a false set of rules on us
that tell us what we do is sinful but that pales in
comparison with the evil perpetrated on a massive
scale by the establishment of the rich, who exploit
the poor for their own benefit. This sense of grow-
ing evil that must be overcome leads Casy to seek
to unite the migrants, and so he becomes a union
organizer.
Building on this new understanding of love and
sin, Casy develops a belief in the inherent holiness
and unity of all. It first came to him, he states, one
night while he was lying beneath the stars. He sud-
denly realized that all nature was tied together and
that it was all holy and that he was a part of it all, an
idea Steinbeck adapted from the one-soul teaching
of Buddhism as understood by Ralph Waldo Emer-
son. This epiphany becomes foundational to Casy’s
vision of the goodness that would be possible in our
world if we all loved one another as we should, and
it gives him an idea of what he is fighting to bring
about in the world by uniting the migrants against
their oppressors.
Near the end of the novel, Casy is killed by vigi-
lantes who are trying to break a strike at a planta-
tion. In his martyrdom, Casy is clearly presented as
a Christ figure; his death acts as a catalyst in Tom
Joad’s life, prodding him to believe in Casy’s substi-
tute religion and to take up his mission of protecting
the poor by loving them and standing up for justice
in the world.
Kelly MacPhail
STEiNbECk, JoHN Of Mice and Men
(1937)
Set in the fertile farmlands of California’s Salinas
Valley, John Steinbeck’s short novel Of Mice and
Men is both a sympathetic portrayal of the migrant
ranch hands who harvest the nation’s crops and a
timeless, if tragic, story of friendship, loyalty, and
the desire for a piece of land to call one’s own.
One of the most widely read and studied novels in
American literature, Of Mice and Men tells the story
of George Milton and his weak-minded traveling
companion, Lennie Small, in their pursuit of the
American dream. For these men who work the
lands that others own, that dream is simple enough.
Of Mice and Men explores the social isola-
tion and economic vulnerability of these men on
the margins of society. “Guys like us, that work on
ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world,” George
tells Lennie. Crooks, the black stable keeper, is
ostracized because of his race, eating and bunking
alone. Candy, old and disabled, awaits his unavoid-
able dismissal when the diminished value of his
labor will lose him both income and companionship.
The strong bonds of friendship and loyalty shared by
George and Lennie stand in sharp contrast to the
economic and societal forces that serve to divide and
isolate the itinerant field hands.
John Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men from his
firsthand experiences as a young man working in the
fields, factories and ranches around his hometown
of Salinas, California. The novel serves to introduce
readers to the “Steinbeck Country” that provides the
setting for many of his greatest stories and the recur-
rent themes such as community, individual and
society, isolation, freedom, nature, justice, and
the American dream those novels explore.
Michael ZeitlerThe amerIcan dream in Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men begins and
ends its narrative along the banks of the Salinas
River with George, a migrant farm laborer, reciting
a story to his weak-minded traveling companion,
Lennie. “Someday,” George tells him, “we’re gonna
get the jack together and we’re gonna have a little
house and a couple of acres an’ a cow and some pigs.”
And, at each retelling, Lennie will get excited and