The Role Of Lennie In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

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“Of Mice and Men” is a short novel written by John Steinbeck about two nomad men who travel together during the Great Depression. The two men are forced together because of Lennie’s inability to care for himself. George and Lennie had known each other for a very long time and had grown to depend on one another. Throughout the book, Lennie has asked George to tell him about how life will be for them in the future however, they never got to experience their ambitious dreams, as life would have it, reality got in the way. The most controversial subject from this book was whether or not George was justified in his decision to kill Lennie. Many people believe that George was justified in killing Lennie due to the fact that Lennie had previously hurt people, killing Curley’s wife made Lennie unable to rejoin society, and Lennie would have suffered worse at the hand of Curley. One of the main reasons that George was justified in killing Lennie was because of Lennie’s unintentional …show more content…
As soon as the men found Curley’s wife’s body, Curley said, “I’m gonna get him. I’m going for my shotgun…I’ll shoot ‘im in the guts. Come on guys” (Steinbeck 96). Not only did Curley want to kill Lennie, but the other men agreed, except with less vain and vengeance. Slim and George talked about having Lennie jailed, then Slim noted, “…they lock him up an’ strap him down and put him in a cage. That ain’t no good, George” (Steinbeck 97), and they agreed death would be better than jail. Curley wanted Lennie to suffer for as long as possible and George had even protested to not kill him, but Curley strongly opposed. George had made the decision to kill Lennie himself so that he could let Lennie die quickly and peacefully, the choice he made was a difficult one but there was no escaping the fact that Lennie would be killed either

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