Now that I think of it…now that I’m too old to care, but let me ask: What’s Steinbeck’s point in writing “Of Mice and Men”?
No, this is not a homework assignment. Just a cynical old fart asking now that I think about things we value in this world.
It’s all here…
What’s anybody’s point in writing anything? He came up with an idea, thought he could sell it for money, was right.
No Darren. It wasn’t just an idea. Steinbeck lived it.
Steinbeck told The New York Times in 1937:[5]
I was a bindlestiff myself for quite a spell. I worked in the same country that the story is laid in. The characters are composites to a certain extent. Lennie was a real person. He’s in an insane asylum in California right now. I worked alongside him for many weeks. He didn’t kill a girl. He killed a ranch foreman. Got sore because the boss had fired his pal and stuck a pitchfork right through his stomach. I hate to tell you how many times. I saw him do it. We couldn’t stop him until it was too late.
The title is from Robert Burns’ To A Mouse:
But Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes of mice and men
Go oft awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!
George and Lennie are struggling to survive during the Depression. They hope and plan to one day have a farm where they could raise rabbits for Lennie to pet. But it’s not to be. Now you are turned out, for all your trouble, / Without house or holding. They planned and tried to find a way to fulfil their dream, but their plans went awry.
What’s Steinbeck’s point? It’s right in the title. We all need to be reminded from time to time of what Robbie Burns originally wrote:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Might as well ask, “what’s the deal with ‘War and Peace’? What’s that got to do with the human condition, anyway?”
ETA: Ninja’d by @Johnny_L.A I see, but being part Scottish, I prefer it in the original dialect 
It’s one of my favorite books. When I win the big one, I’m going to film it verbatim- no added dialog or scenes.
Me too. I just copied it from the wrong side of the table.
Well, I will try to go see it when it is made but you have reminded me how much I enjoyed the 1939 version with Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney Jr. I will add it to my list of movies to watch again before I die. Ones that I really enjoyed but have only seen once.
I think his point is that life sucks and then we die.
Actually, that’s the point of most of Steinbeck’s writing.
This is why we love TCM. They’re always showing movies we love.
Steinbeck wrote it so that Bob Weir could borrow the plot and write Jack Straw.
The 1992 version with Gary Sinise and John Malkovich is also really good. It’s a film that deserves more attention.
More like, “life sucks and then we live”.
I first got into Steinbeck when I was assigned to read ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ in a high school AP English class. I dreaded cracking the book open at first, but I loved it. After that I devoured everything, or at least close to it, that he ever wrote. He had this knack for describing sweeping vistas of life and nature in cinematic detail. I’ve always been a very visual reader, meaning I often conjure clear mental images of what I read, so his writing style was perfect for my reading style.
To the OP, I feel like asking “what’s the point of Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’” may as well be asking ‘what’s the point of all fiction?’ I mean, the latter is a viewpoint that some people do share, but one that I heartliy disagree with.
In the early 1960s Steinbeck was in his ascendancy when postwar America was also in its. Even though he’d slammed bankers and fat-ass cops in The Grapes of Wrath, he and his books were still feted by the New Frontier types as an example what was great about our Great Society. This was when the rival USSR was promoting garbage like And Quiet Flows the Don, suppressing Dr Zhivago and Khrushchev was blowing his stack at an exhibition of abstract art. In the US, hobby-painter Eisenhower admitted he didn’t understand abstract art but clearly saw that it was what a free society created. Steinbeck went on a road trip with his dog to see what the US was still like, and LBJ tried to get him to be a cheerleader for Vietnam as well as his domestic programs. To his credit he demurred.
For a while after his death, he was the known as the author of “high school classics.” That was the environment where I read much of his books. In the 1970’s the sex in his books was not unacceptable for American adolescents, and his themes thought beneficial compared to his contemporaries: chest-thumping Hemingway, cynical John O’Hara. Novels by Southern Gothics and Jewish masturbators would have to wait for college.
But Steinbeck is unacceptable today. Brothels, brothels run by a woman known as “The N-word,” Native Americans dismissed as lazy grubbers on the very first page of East of Eden, Bums and whores in Cannery Row, Mexican itinerants in Tortilla Flat.
What Mice and Men has, as well as Steinbeck’s other works have, appreciated by 1970s liberal educators, was the application to American characters and situations of a theme developed earlier by Leo Tolstoy: Man is made for happiness, and because of the tragedies that lie in his path, he needs to maintain a belief in happiness no matter what.
Have you ever been down Salinas way
Where Steinbeck found the valley?
And he wrote about it the way it was
In his travelings with Charley
This is an interesting take. In my post immediately preceding yours, in which I wrote a short appreciation of Steinbeck, I did almost mention that I haven’t read him in years and I wonder if I reread his novels today, how well they would have have aged from when I read them in my late teens and early 20s.
Not having read his novels in years, I can’t say whether your condemnation of Steinbeck is completely warranted or not, but it seems a little harsh. Steinbeck was a champion of the downtrodden, and I haven’t heard anything about him having racist leanings, though I don’t really keep up on the latest opinions of classic authors. Brothels, prostitutes and bums are things that exist, and people were called the n-word back then. Just because an author uses the term does not mean they endorse it. I’ll have to reread Cannery Row, Tortilla Flat and (at least the first page of) East of Eden and see how they hold up to me now.
Where do I condemn him? I just pointed out the reception he’s getting today, which I personally don’t care about one bit. Google “Steinbeck racist” and all the hit pieces jump right up.
Which… sucks. I know “woke” is a RW snarl word, but in fact there is a culture of sanctimonious nit-picking, where writers who describe the world as it is are attacked by those who will only accept the word as it should be.
Especially sad in Steinbeck’s case, since he said this at his Nobel acceptance speech:
“I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”
Ok, I initially thought your post was favorable to Steinbeck until it seemed like you took a left turn with “But Steinbeck is unacceptable today”, and proceeded to give examples why. On first scan I thought you were expressing your own opinion, but I get the irony now on a second read.