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.”
Of Mice and Men – 1
Of Mice and Men – 2
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.”
Of Mice and Men – 8
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.
Of Mice and Men – 12
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.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God: 1
On the first page of the text, Hurston writes, “Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins,” as a description of the people who’ve been forced to labor all day. This description can be related to a characterization of black women as “de mule uh de world” that is made later by the main character’s grandmother.
Their Eyes Were Watching God: 6
Janie’s grandmother offers a distillation of gender and race relations by telling Janie white men rule the world, but they’ve passed their burdens over to black men. Black men, in turn, did the same thing to people over whom they had power, black women. Consequently, black women bear the world’s burdens. As Janie’s grandmother puts it, “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God: 16
When a hurricane strikes, Janie and Tea Cake are forced to flee and they come into contact with a “massive built dog” sitting on the shoulders of a cow. Tea Cake defends Janie by killing the dog, but when he contracts rabies, she concludes that “that big old dawg with the hatred in his eyes had killed her after all,” by killing Tea Cake. When the disease takes over Tea Cake’s mind, it makes him paranoid and aggressive. He approaches Janie with a gun and she shoots him to defend herself, but she’s heartbroken when he dies.