Book Report of Of Mice and Men

Book Report on “Of Mice and Men”

英语二班

12450018 李祉旼

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck is about two major characters Lennie and George. It shows the hard times during the Great Depression. The novel compares Lennie and George to the migrant workers. The novel shows how George takes care of Lennie who has a mental disability. Many migrant workers at that time wanted to achieve the American dream and so did George and Lennie. George’s dream was to own a ranch and for Lennie to take care of the rabbits.

I decided to write about one of the characters of “Of Mice and Men”, Crooks, after reading the novel. Through Crooks I think the author showed the side of segregation and racism. He first appears in the book in Chapter 3 to tell Slim that he prepared the tar just as he was told to. Crooks also tells him about Lennie, who seem to have been handling the puppies too roughly. At the beginning this is all we could know about him. I empathized Lennie a lot as I think it was the author’s intention and it felt like that Steinbeck also intended take the reader’s compassion away from Crooks.

In chapter 4 he became one of the major characters and I could know a lot more about him. The writer portrays him as being distant and we get to know that he is not really a nice guy. Lennie goes to his room because he wants to pet the puppies and Crooks treats him with coldness. Later, he tells Lennie how George would leave him forever which would have been so hard to hear in Lennie’s shoes. He keeps torturing Lennie and having fun until he somehow gets scared at what a huge guy like Lennie could do to him. By the moment I got really disgusted at Cooks but it somehow felt like it was meant to be like that

When Candy came into the story this was a turning point for me to what I felt about Crooks. In this moment Steinbeck portrayed him as a lonely person and through the characters lines I learned that he suffers a lot because he could not talk or play with white workers and all he has are books because the is an African American.

Later, he gets very sour and tells Lennie how he will never get to have a life in the land he was talking about and how that dream is only in the workers’ minds. He says that other people don’t have the right to go in his room without authority. It seems to be the only right he has. Steinbeck seemed to play with my feelings, making me change my opinion about Crooks about him there and now.

Afterwards, Candy comes and the three characters start to chat. Crooks finally yield to the feeling that they could actually be friends and he even asks if he could join them on the land they have been dreaming about.

And finally, Curley’s wife starts talking to the three. They realize she’s looking for trouble and Crooks tells her to go away or he would ask the boss not to let her in the farm anymore while Lennie and Candy sits quiet. She gets very annoyed and calls him nigger. He then suddenly feels like he has been snapped back to reality and realizes it is impossible for him to have a white friend or to have a place of his own and live peacefully. She then says the cruelest thing she could say: “Well, you keep your place then, Nigger. I could get you strung up on a tree so easy it ain’t even funny.” After that, Crooks is discouraged seems to accept his fate, as a black man who has no right to anything but his own room filled with books in which he can order white people not to come in. At this point, Steinbeck manages to capture the reader’s compassion