George In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

530 Words3 Pages
Our first impression of George is that he is short tempered and easily frustrated. In the first couple of pages, George repeatedly refers to Lennie and the bus driver as a ‘bastard’ (4). Steinbeck also uses many exclamation marks in George’s dialogue, while scolding Lennie about how he easily forgets things. However, our image of George changes throughout the book. We come to know that George is more caring and loyal to protecting his friend Lennie. When George first meets Curley, he senses Curley’s ‘pugnacious’ (28) nature and tells Lennie to ‘keep away from Curley’ (33) so that he would not get hurt by him or get in trouble. Even though Steinbeck sets a basic establishment of their relationship of how George protects Lennie earlier on in the book, this puts an emphasis on how caring George is by showing how concerned and attentive he is about his friend’s well-being. Even though their…show more content…
One way Steinbeck does this is by making us more familiar with the character before and more than most of the other characters. In the first chapter, we only encounter two characters: George and Lennie. Hence Steinbeck is able to have us focus on familiarizing with them, which ultimately leads to further understanding of George. Also, Steinbeck’s use of antagonists and unfortunate events causes readers to commiserate with George. For example, when Lennie murders Curley’s wife, George is forced to kill Lennie because either way Curley, an antagonist, will demand for Lennie to be killed. When Lennie dies, George loses hope in the dream that they had and says, ‘“I’ll work my month an’ I’ll take my fifty bucks an’ I’ll stay all night in some lousy cathouse.”’ (107) Because of Curleys’ opposition to Georges’ will of letting Lennie live, he is also forced to give up his dream. Since we know how much the dream means to George, Steinbeck makes readers sympathize for
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