The first description of Lennie emphasizes his animal-like characteristics. He is described as having “sloping shoulders” and he “walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws.” When he stops to drink from a lake, Steinbeck writes that he “flung himself down and drank from the surface of the green pool…snorting into the water like a horse.” In this same scene, Lennie’s hand is described as a “paw.”
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When Lennie tries to keep a mouse hidden in his pocket, away from George, Steinbeck compares him to a dog, writing, “Slowly, like a terrier who doesn’t want to bring a ball to his master, Lennie approached, drew back, approached again.”
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George loses his temper with Lennie and reflects aloud on how different his life would be if he didn’t feel responsible for him, saying “God a’mighty, if I was alone I could live so easy.” As he elaborates on this thought, what he expresses seems to typify the determinism that is characteristic of naturalist literature, or the idea that forces outside of a person’s power control their life.
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After he loses his temper at Lennie, the solution George imagines is one that dehumanizes his friend. He says, “I wisht I could put you in a cage with about a million mice an’ let you have fun.”
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When George is trying to get Lennie hired at a new work-site, he brags about his physical capabilities, saying he’s “Strong as a bull.” But the boss is suspicious because Lennie doesn’t speak for himself, and says “Then why don’t you let him answer? What are you trying to put over?” The fact that George thinks and talks for Lennie at the same time that he emphasizes Lennie’s physical capabilities makes the two of them a good example of the body/mind dichotomy.
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After his elderly dog is killed, an old man named Candy says “When they can me here I wisht somebody’d shoot me.” This lament accompanies Candy’s request that Lennie and George take him along to the ranch that they imagine they’ll own one day. He buys in to their dream that they’ll find something more than the mundane routine that typifies their lives.
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The black “stable buck,” Crooks, threatens Lennie’s sense of security by asking cruel hypothetical questions. After asking Lennie what he’ll do if George abandons him, Crooks answers the question for himself, saying, “Want me ta tell ya what’ll happen? They’ll take ya to the booby hatch. They’ll tie ya up with a collar, like a dog.” This point reinforces the animal-like way in which Lennie is characterized throughout the novel. But the fact that Crooks himself is referred to as a “stable buck” is somewhat dehumanizing as well, so one interpretation of this scene might be that Crooks abuses Lennie because misery loves company.
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Crooks, a black character, disparages Lennie and George’s dream of owning land and compares their dream to ideas about heaven. He says, “I seen hunderds [sic] of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads…Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land.” If Crooks’s disillusionment can be associated with modernism, does his perspective support Toni Morrison’s idea that “Black people were the first modernists,” the first to be disillusioned as a result of their experience in America?
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When Crooks asks Curley’s wife to leave his room, she checks him by asking, “You know what I could do?” Crooks backs down but she continues, saying “Well, you keep your place then, Nigger. I could get you strung up on a tree so easy it ain’t even funny.”
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When Lennie accidentally kills Curley’s wife, Candy says, “You don’t know that Curley. Curley gon’ta wanta get ‘im lynched.” This reference to lynching creates an association between dehumanized Lennie, who’s often described as if he’s an animal, and black people who were dehumanized, described as if they are animals and lynched.
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The last description of Lennie is unmistakably animalistic. Steinbeck writes, “Lennie came quietly to the pool’s edge. He knelt down and drank, barely touching his lips to the water,” and when a bird makes a noise, “his head jerked up and he strained toward the sound with eyes and ears until he saw the bird, and then he dropped his head and drank again.”