Isolation, confinement and loneliness are major themes within Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Without Isolation, confinement and loneliness, the novels would have an entirely different consequences and outcome. With the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper and Lennie from Of Mice and Men being isolated in the setting of the novels, there is no escape from achieving a positive resolution. Dialogue shows the confinement of Lennie’s and the narrator’s mental capacities, as well as foreshadowing, that demonstrates how the only way to gain a sense of freedom in both texts is to die. Dialogue blows up the lonliness of the narrator and George, while symbolism displays how it let it comes to the “blow up”point.
Steinbeck and Gilman explore the theme of isolation, in both texts, by using the literary technique of setting. The setting is associated with the room in The Yellow Wallpaper and the bunkhouse in Of Mice and Men. The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper is isolated from a healthy outcome of postpartum syndrome due to the ineffective rest cure conducted in the room, whereas Lennie, in Of Mice and Men, is isolated from fulfilling his dream of…show more content… Dialogue enables the reader to define both characters and demonstrate their unique thoughts and visions to the reader. This narration “Aunt Clara was gone, and from out of Lennie’s head there came a gigantic rabbit. And it spoke in Lennie’s voice too” pg100) in Of Mice and Men indicates how Lennie’s very confined brain led him to hallucinating and talking to two imaginary figures. The same incident occurs with the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper. “I don’t like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast.” This dialogue directly shows how the narrator, with a mental illness that confines her logic, imagined many women “creeping” around her private front