(AO1)
• animals are significant throughout the novel. In the first section, wildlife is described to set the scene and to foreshadow the events that follow. The water snake manages to escape the heron, but at the end of the novel the heron catches the water snake
• Lennie is often described as an animal, suggesting both his strengths (‘bear’, ‘bull’, ‘horse’) and weaknesses (‘lamb’). Lennie loves to pet soft things and ‘broke’ the mouse by ‘pettin’ it’ too hard. Lennie’s innate physical strength is foreshadowed as he first unintentionally kills his puppy (‘I didn’t bounce you hard’), then ‘breaks’ Curley’s wife’s neck after he strokes her hair too hard • Lennie is obsessed with rabbits. His dream is to tend the rabbits and to feed them with alfalfa. Lennie threatens to break the necks of any ‘God damn’ cat that should threaten the lives of the ‘future rabbits’. At the end of the novel, Lennie’s conscience plays havoc when a gigantic rabbit springs out of his mind to scorn him
• Slim gives Lennie one of Lulu’s nine puppies. Lennie accidentally kills the puppy and it is when he is mourning his puppy and trying to hide its body that Curley’s wife tries to comfort him in the barn
• Candy’s dog is shot by Carlson, which Candy later regrets as he feels he should have done it himself. Candy is dependent on his dog and is reluctant to have it put down. When he says that he should have ‘shot that dog myself’, it foreshadows later events when George shoots Lennie in the back of the head with Carlson’s Luger pistol
• at the end of the novel, George indulges Lennie by making him think of their dream. The last thoughts Lennie has before he dies are related to ‘tend[ing] the rabbits’. In this way, Lennie is the only character to fulfil his dream and to die happy.
(AO4)
• the title of the novel comes directly from Robert Burns’ poem: To a Mouse. The poem tells of a mouse having to run from a scythe and ‘The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, / Gang aft agley’. The title links to characters’ dreams and how their American Dream will often go wrong
• Lennie relies on George to care for him. There was little or no provision of social care. Without George, Lennie would most likely have been put in a ‘booby hatch’ and, as Crooks taunts, he would be kept like a dog: ‘They’ll tie ya up with a collar’
• the time the novel is set is during a time of insecurities and survival of the fittest. When Slim’s dog, Lulu, has puppies, Slim ‘drowned four of ‘em right off’. She couldn’t feed that many’
• the novel gives a backdrop of the lives of itinerant farm labourers and how animals provided comfort and companionship, such as Lennie petting the mice and Candy’s dog being the only companion he has, thus combating his loneliness.