Mice and Men Juicy Examples to Use in Exam

JUICY AND MEATY EXAMPLES          Of Mice and Men

The opening

‘The evening of a hot day’ >>> pathetic fallacy >>> creates sense of foreboding/sets scene for violence

‘huge companion’ ‘small man>> playable novel > contrast

‘Lennie dabbled his big paw’>>> Animal imagery
'Snorting into the water like a horse' >>>> animal imagery
"Dragging his feet like a bear drags its paws" >>>> animal imagery

‘I didn’t kill it! Honest! I found it’. >>>animal imagery >> foreshadowing

Curley’s wife

>>> we judge her as being ‘jailbait’, ‘tart’ as the men do, and then realise that she is a victim (we look at appearances)

‘She smiled archly and twitched her body’ >> Curley’s wife is always trying to manipulate the men into giving her attention >>>> shows her real loneliness and desperate (loveless) situation

‘rectangle of light in the doorway was cut off’ >>> first time Curley’s wife enters >> playable novel, foreshadowing (she creates darkness)

‘tiny little sausages’

Her name! She has no identity and no place. She has no voice (just like Lennie + George and the migrant workers in America at this time.)

When she dies, the same aspects of her appearance are highlighted as when she was first introduced as a seductive ‘Tart’, this time laden with deep pathos>> make the reader feel partially complicit as we had a low opinion of her just like the men, initially.

‘The curls, tiny little sausages, were spread on the hay behind her head, and her lips were parted.’

‘As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment.’ >> moment of her death, everything slows >>> highlights its importance/sense of tragedy

Animal imagery

‘I shouldn’t ought let no stranger shoot my dog’ (Candy)

Lennie looked sadly, ‘They was so little’

He kills the mice and the puppy because he doesn’t know his own strength>>> foreshadowing the tragedy of Curley’s wife’s death + Lennie’s death

Slim

‘Majesty only achieved by royalty’

‘His authority was so great that his word was taken on any subject, be it politics or love’

‘Prince of the ranch’

>>>Slim stands apart from the other characters…. Appears to suggest that there is hope.

Could be interpreted as the ideal, fully evolved man…

The Dream

‘An live off the fatta of the lan’ (Lennie)

‘No you tell it…. Go on George’ …. ‘How I get to tend the rabbits’

>>> dream is like a fairy-tale or a bed time story that George tells Lennie to comfort him

>> biblical imagery (fat, milk, honey) >>> implies that it will never happen, that it’s not true…>>>> pathos >>> Criticism of society that misled the poor and gave them false hope

‘Nobody never gets to heaven, nobody gets no land’. It’s just in their head.’ (Crooks)

The Ending

‘Take off your hat Lennie’.

‘Lennie removed his hat dutifully’

‘He said shakily’ ‘He looked steadily..’ ‘The hand shook violently’

>>> George is fighting for self-control at this pivotal moment and we see this through his trembling and his resolve to kill Lennie (and therefore protect him)

Dramatic irony – Lennie’s last words ‘Let’s go to that place now’  - death is the only way, Steinbeck implies, that Lennie can be happy in the harsh world of the novel>>> tragedy>>>>pathos