Katrina
Manning/Dautel
English Period 2
10/9/17
Isolation and Loneliness: Analyzing Of Mice and Men
How would it feel to be alone, with no friends or family, during one of the hardest periods of United States history? In Of Mice and Men, the author John Steinbeck, and naturalist writer, tells a story that takes place in California during the Great Depression and highlights how lonely people were. Steinbeck wrote this novel and included characters like Crooks, Candy, and Curley's wife to show that human beings need relationships in order to be happy, because when people don't interact, they begin to isolate themselves and have a negative outlook on life.
In Of Mice and Men, the character Crooks, an African-American stable buck, is portrayed as …show more content…
She is the only woman on the ranch and just wants someone to talk to. Whenever she tries to make conversation with the ranch men, they turn her away, thinking she's trying to cause trouble. When the men tell her to go back to her husband, she yells, “Sure I got a husban’. You all seen him. Swell guy, ain't he? Spends all his time sayin’ what he's gonna do to guys he don't like, and he don't like nobody” (Steinbeck 38). It appears that nobody wants to talk to Curley's wife, even their husband. They don't want anything to do with her because they think that she has “the eye”, and they don't want any trouble from Curley. Steinbeck created this character to convey that she is seen as flirty when she just wants someone to talk to. Her dream was to be a movie star, but that changed when her mother said she was too young, and she never got a letter back from the man who promised to make her a star. Being a teenager, she abandoned her mother. She met Curley and married him just to make a point. She is very unhappy with her life now and she can never fulfill her dream. Curley's wife is lonely because now that she's married, she is stuck with her husband