New York Diary

On Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men

I read Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. I've never before been able to get through anything by Steinbeck, but that trend has been emphatically ended by this book. It is simply exceptional.

I have trouble defining that exceptionality, however. Three factors come to mind, but they can hardly account for the force of this book. I'm going to list them anyway.

First, I was drawn into an emotional attachment to several of the story's characters. As a result, I was deeply invested in, and greatly moved by, the horrifying (but necessary?) end of the tale. Knowing what had to happen at the story's end, and feeling heavily the tragedy of that situation, I even went so far as to shed a tear or two.

Second, the story is incredibly well-crafted. It is tight: one killing echoes--and is perhaps necessitated by the logic of--another; accidental victims grow in size and complexity from mouse to puppy to woman, and the trend is obvious and terrible; the entire book is put together in order to make the last few scenes predictable--and therein lies their power, because you know they have to happen and the anticipation aches.

The third exceptional feature of Steinbeck's story is the complex relationship it has to Burns's "To A Mouse," which I went back and read for the first time in years after reading Steinbeck's story. Of Mice and Men is something of a variation on a theme set by Burns, and it is highly successful as such. Like the poem, it illustrates for us that "the best-laid plans of mice and men / gang aft a-gley." But Steinbeck does more than that: he trumps Burns when it comes to showing that dreadful human condition by which we cannot help think about what has happened, and what will happen in the future. To be sure, Burns stresses the same point; he finds a mouse more "blest" than he himself is, because the mouse lives in the present while he is left to "guess and fear" what is to come. But Of Mice and Men realizes the idea that Burns merely states: Steinbeck's characters live for their future hopes, and when George kills Lennie, it is all the worse because it is a premeditated, well-considered act which he hates--but which he knows he must (and will) do. More than that, though, Steinbeck drew me into this illustration: I knew what was going to happen at the end of the story, yet I dreaded finding the place in the book where it actually did happen. I was awaiting Lennie's death (and the death of Curley's wife, for that matter) with a kind of dread, and a kind of hope that somehow the story would be just as good with a different ending.

(It wouldn't have been, of course.)

  But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane
  In proving foresight may be vain:
  The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
          Gang aft a-gley,
  An lea'e us nought but grief an' pain
          For promised joy.

  Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
  The present only toucheth thee:
  But, och! I backward cast my ee
          On prospects drear!
  An' forward, tho' I canna see,
          I guess an' fear!

posted by Skay @ 7:11 AM