I am an ant, an ant that crawls slowly.
"Hopefully one day I'll have a little piece of land, a hut, a cow, a rabbit, and some chickens."
Such a life is the life of Lenny and George in John Steinbeck's "Between Man and Mouse", a simple and simple dream that was like a mirage in the desert in that era, out of reach.
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > John Steinbeck</h1>
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) was an American novelist and Nobel Laureate in Literature.
Growing up in the countryside and pastures, he is very familiar with the customs and customs of the countryside. During his college years, in order to survive, he engaged in various manual labor, and such a rich life experience provided him with sufficient and credible material for writing the novel "Between Man and Mouse".
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > between humans and mice</h1>
"Between Man and Mouse" tells the story of two poor workers who are dependent on each other and experience murder and shattered dreams while working on a farm.
Let's take a look at how three murders happened and how they ultimately destroyed their dreams.
The first one: the death of the old dog
Deceased: Old Shepherd. This old dog was raised by Candy from childhood to adulthood, with gray coat, blind eyes, and too old to be old.
Murderer: Carlson. He was blessed with a big belly and a Ruger gun in a sack under the bed.
Murder weapon: Ruger gun.
Motivation: Carlson thinks the smell of old dogs stinks and is too old to be useful. Keeping it is just a burden, it is better to give it a pain.
The course of the crime: Carlson leads the old shepherd to the farm in the dark with a chain, shoots it, shoots it, and buries it in place with a shovel.
witness:
Candy: The palm of his right hand was broken due to his work, and the farmer kept him as a cleaner in addition to compensating him for money.
Slim: A capable mule, a leader in the workers' heap.
Lenny: Unusually tall, low-energy forgetfulness, big eyes. Loved having George repeat their dreams and "touching" things constantly, but the habit caused them a lot of trouble.
George: Short, shrewd, and has some life experience. He has always taken care of Lenny in life and work, and there are four main reasons for this:
1. The entrustment of Aunt Clara;
2. You can appear smart around low-energy Lenny;
3. It can make him relieve loneliness and have a feeling of being needed;
4. The dream that Lenny keeps repeating gives him the illusion that he is within reach rather than the distant skyline;
effect:
Candy regrets that he didn't kill his old shepherd with his own hands, but instead had a stranger kill him.
Candy, hearing about George and Lenny's dreams, offers to fund them, and he wants a place of his own.
The second case: the death of a woman
Deceased: Curley's wife. With soft hair, beautiful and lonely, he is dissatisfied with his current life and her husband Curley. He likes to hang around the farm and is considered by the workers to be a misdemeanor, which will sooner or later lead to disasters.
Murderer: Lenny.
Murder Weapon: Lenny's hands.
Motivation: Lenny covers her mouth and shakes her, fearing that Curley's wife's shouts will attract others, but overexertion leads to her death.
Crime Process: When Lenny is overwhelmed by "touching" the puppy in the barn, Coley's wife comes to talk to him. Curley's wife was proud to have soft hair and asked Lenny to touch it with her hand. Lenny's rude movements, which had always been ignorant, made Curley's wife feel pain and scream. This call caused Lenny to panic, and he quickly covered the woman's mouth and nose and shook her, trying to make her stop crying, but the result was that the woman was shaken to death by her.
Candy: When I went into the barn to look for Lenny, I found a body half covered in hay.
Carlux: Crooked back to black people, distance from people, lonely and numb.
George: He was taken to the barn by Candy. When he saw the body, his worst fears happened: Lenny had made an inescapable mistake.
Curley: Lightweight boxer who brags all day about how good his boxing is and goes around looking for his newly married wife.
SLIM: It means they're going to catch Lenny.
Carlson: When he set out to capture Lenny, he found that his Ruger gun had been stolen.
Candy knew that his dream life was shattered.
George knew he was going to make a choice.
The third case: the death of a man
Deceased: Lenny.
Murderer: George.
Murder weapon: Ruger gun. George stole it from a sack under Coulson's bed.
Motivation: George doesn't want Lenny to suffer Curley's brutal lynching.
The course of the crime: George finds Lenny hiding in the bushes, where he tells lenny that if something goes wrong, he will have to hide in the bushes by the pond to wait for him. He comforted and echoed Lenny before the rest of the farm came looking for him, tricking him into turning his gaze to the other side of the river and shooting Lenny in the back of the head with a shudder.
Slim: Take George to drink negative loneliness and grief.
Curley and Carlson.
Slim advised him to go for a drink, and he responded. He knew that his dreams had been shattered with Lenny's death. His life will be like that of other co-workers—getting paid to drink and find a woman or lose at the gambling table, and then working to and from work, repeating this cycle of despair until he dies.
summary:
In tens of thousands of words, "Between Man and Mouse" depicts the process of the disillusionment of George and Lenny's dreams through three murders. And that's just a tiny microcosm of that era. In the United States during the Great Depression of the 1930s and 1934, peasants and workers who had lost their land and homes had to work and live a difficult life due to the expropriation of industrial capitalists. They have given everything just to survive. And their dream is nothing more than to own a piece of land, a cottage, self-sufficiency. But such a dream was nothing more than a yellow sorghum dream in that era.
Alas, a grain of ash of the times falls on the head of an individual, and that is a mountain.
Thanks for reading!