George Killing Lennie Cruel

Of Mice and Men is a novella, written by John E. Steinbeck, about two California men trying to keep afloat during the Great Depression. The two main characters, George and Lennie, had been partners for a long time and needed each other. Throughout the book Lennie asks George to tell him the story that he always tells, about how they were going purchase land for them to live together, and rabbits for Lennie to pet. But that never happened, unfortunately, as reality reared its ugly head. The most controversial subject in the book was George killing Lennie in the end. To many people, it was the right and merciful thing to do for multiple reasons, the first reason being that Lennie was unwillingly dangerous to those around him as well as to himself, the second reason is that Lennie could not be able to subsist without George and the last being that if George didn’t shoot Lennie, Curley would have.

Lennie is

In the first chapter George and Lennie had to remove themselves from a town named Weed because Lennie had caused trouble for the both of them. Lennie had an attraction to soft things, such as rabbits. In the book he reached out and grabbed a woman’s soft dress. The woman in question started screaming, as we find out later through exposition, and all he had done was hold onto her dress tighter frozen with fear and not knowing what to do. This action results in the woman screaming rape which leads up to them being run out of town by other men. George told Slim, another character, that he had once told Lennie to jump into a river as a joke. This nearly resulted in Lennie drowning. That, and when Curley assaulted Lennie and Lennie didn’t even try to defend himself proves that he was indeed a danger to himself and others when he accidentally kills a puppy and breaks Curley’s wife’s neck because he didn’t understand the amount of strength he