Pearson Edexcel International GCSE in English Literature · 4ET1 · Free · no account needed

Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men — character analysis

Of Mice and Men · John Steinbeck · Set text on Pearson Edexcel International GCSE English Literature (4ET1) — Modern Prose option · Grade 9 Notes

In one sentence. Immense strength, no control of it — the innocent this world cannot house

Lennie Small — the surname is the book's one open joke — is ‘a huge man, shapeless of face', introduced walking ‘the way a bear drags his paws' and drinking from the pool ‘like a horse'. Steinbeck builds him almost entirely from appetite and sensation: softness to touch, the dream's rabbits, ketchup, the reassurance of George's voice. He has a learning disability the 1930s had no humane category for, and the novella is precise about the machinery that closes on such a man: work that wants his body, a society that fears his mind, and no institution between the ‘booby hatch' and the rope. He kills a mouse, a puppy and a woman in an ascending series without ever once intending harm — Steinbeck's most unsettling design, because it removes intention from tragedy and leaves only consequence.

This study ends with John Steinbeck. Build your reading of Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men, teach it, then defend it against John Steinbeck.

How Lennie Small develops

The riverbank — appetite, imitation, and the dead mouse

“I could pet it with my thumb while we walked along.” — Lennie, Chapter 1

The dead mouse in Lennie's pocket is the novella in miniature: tenderness that kills, comfort carried past its death, and a pattern already old (‘You've broke it pettin' it', George says of the mice Aunt Clara used to give him). Steinbeck plants the entire tragedy in a rodent on page one — by the barn scene the reader has watched the same gesture scale up through a puppy to a woman, and recognises the ending before the characters do. That recognition-machinery is the book's structure, and naming it is high-value AO1.

Methods: foreshadowing · motif of soft things · escalating repetition

Watch the imitation: Lennie ‘imitated George exactly', pulling his hat to the same angle, checking that his posture matches. Steinbeck gives him a child's technology of belonging — copy the loved one — and an animal's memory (Aunt Clara ‘gone', instructions lost within a sentence, but ‘the rabbits' indelible). The one thing he never forgets is the dream, because it is the one story in which he is neither a problem nor a danger: ‘An' live off the fatta the lan',' Lennie shouted. ‘An' have rabbits.'

“I was only foolin', George. I don't want no ketchup. I wouldn't eat no ketchup if it was right here beside me.” — Lennie, Chapter 1

Renunciation as love: the only currency Lennie has is his own wants, so he offers them. The comic surface (ketchup as the ultimate sacrifice) sits over the book's emotional engine — Lennie's absolute dependence produces absolute devotion, and George's response (the dream-speech follows within a page) shows the ritual working as reconciliation. Use this to argue the bond is reciprocal: George supplies protection; Lennie supplies the reason for it.

Methods: bathos · gift-logic of the powerless

The ranch — the hand, the puppy, and strength without owner

The ranch weaponises what the riverbank only foreshadowed. Slim hands Lennie a puppy — soft thing number two — and Curley hands him a fight. Steinbeck choreographs the crushing of Curley's hand as pure mechanism: Lennie does nothing until George's ‘Get 'im, Lennie!' licenses him, then cannot stop until George slaps him loose — strength with an on-switch and no off-switch, and both switches held by someone else. ‘I didn't wanta,' Lennie cried. ‘I didn't wanta hurt him.' Every disaster in the book is inside that sentence.

Grade 9 insight. Grade 9 move: track whose hands do what. Curley's hand is ‘kept soft' in a vaseline glove for his wife — vanity; Candy has no hand — the machine took it; Lennie's ‘paw' crushes without malice; George's hand ‘shook violently' and then steadies on the trigger. Steinbeck runs the whole moral argument through hands, and in Section C you cash this as design (AO1), not imagery-spotting (AO2): the book keeps asking what a man's hands are FOR in an economy that only rents them.

“Why do you got to get killed? You ain't so little as mice. I didn't bounce you hard.” — Lennie, Chapter 5

Over the dead puppy, Lennie reasons like a scientist with one variable — size — and grieves mostly for the rabbits his crime now threatens (‘George ain't gonna let me tend no rabbits'). Steinbeck is unsentimental here on purpose: Lennie cannot mourn the puppy as a life, only as a consequence, and the reader is made to feel the gap. Minutes later the same gap will swallow Curley's wife; the puppy scene exists so we cannot call what follows unforeseeable.

Methods: dramatic irony · rehearsal scene · child logic

The barn and the brush — the trap closes

The killing of Curley's wife is written as panic, not violence: she invites the touch (‘Feel right aroun' there an' see how soft it is'), then struggles, and Lennie's grip becomes her death in the same clause-rhythm as the mice — hold, panic, still. Steinbeck's narration keeps the moment terribly quiet: ‘her body flopped like a fish. And then she was still, for Lennie had broken her neck.' The simile has appeared before — Curley ‘flopping like a fish' in Lennie's grip — and the echo tells you this is one force meeting two bodies, not two crimes.

In the brush, Lennie keeps the only appointment he never forgets (‘Hide in the brush an' wait for George') and hallucinates his guilt — Aunt Clara and a giant rabbit speaking ‘in Lennie's voice', scolding him with his own borrowed phrases. Even his conscience is secondhand, assembled from George's complaints. Then George arrives, and Steinbeck grants Lennie the only painless page in the book: he dies mid-dream, ‘Le's do it now. Le's get that place now', looking across the river at a farm that was never there. Argue what that mercy means — and what it says that the gentlest death in the novella is the one a friend administers.

How Steinbeck builds Lennie

Animal register, echo-speech, and the sentence that repeats

Lennie is written from the outside in animal terms — bear, horse, terrier, ‘paws' — and from the inside in echo-speech: he repeats what George has just said, repeats his own requests, and reaches for the dream's fixed phrases whenever the conversation exceeds him. The repetition is not comic filler; it is a portrait of a memory that holds rhythm but not content. Steinbeck lets him lose an instruction inside a single page while the phrase ‘live off the fatta the lan'' survives from Chapter 1 to Chapter 6 intact, because it was learned as music.

His grammar is the simplest in the book: short declaratives, present tense, coordination rather than subordination (‘I done a bad thing. I done another bad thing'). Because he cannot subordinate clauses, he cannot subordinate ideas — cause and consequence never link. Steinbeck uses this to devastating effect in the barn: Lennie's account of the puppy runs cause, effect and self-exculpation as three separate sentences with nothing joining them, so the reader supplies the connection the character cannot. That gap between what he says and what we understand is the novella's engine of pity.

behaviourist narration: Narration that reports only what a camera could record — action, gesture, speech — and never enters a character's mind. Steinbeck uses it throughout; with Lennie it is doubly important, because a narrator who explained his thoughts would sentimentalise him and let the reader off.

Structurally, Lennie is a repeating device: mouse, puppy, woman — the same event scaled three times. Steinbeck reuses vocabulary across the series (things are ‘broke', bodies go still, hands are ‘pettin'') so the reader recognises the third by its rhythm. The novella therefore does not build suspense; it builds recognition, which is a colder and more tragic effect. In Section C, argue this as authorial design rather than as imagery, and it pays AO1: Steinbeck arranges the book so we know before the characters do.

The world that made Lennie

Disability in 1930s America — no name, no provision, no protection

Attitudes to disability. 1930s America had no rights framework for people with learning disabilities and a vocabulary — ‘feeble-minded', ‘imbecile' — that classified rather than described. Institutionalisation was the standard route; the eugenics movement was mainstream, and by the mid-1930s more than thirty US states had passed sterilisation laws aimed at the ‘unfit'. Slim's phrase for the alternative to escape — the ‘booby hatch' — is the era's slang for exactly that world. Steinbeck never names Lennie's condition, which spares him the era's labels; the novella instead shows the machinery a man like him met: work that wants his back, fear of his hands, and no institution between the asylum and the mob.

Ranch justice. The final hunt is not policing. Curley assembles neighbours with shotguns; the deputy sheriff's absence is the point — rural California in the 1930s still settled matters with posses, and the lynching of prisoners in the American West was recent, documented history (a notorious California case in San Jose in 1933 saw two men taken from jail and hanged by a crowd, with the state's governor publicly approving). When George chooses the riverbank, he is choosing against a real institution, not an imagined one — which is the AO4 fact that most changes how the ending reads.

Where the character came from. Steinbeck told an interviewer in 1937 that Lennie was based on a man he had worked alongside — a labourer of great strength and limited understanding who had killed a foreman, and who was committed rather than tried. Treat the anecdote as attributed rather than certain in its details, but its direction is clear and useful: the novella grew from observed life, and its refusal to make Lennie either monstrous or saintly is a reporter's discipline as much as a novelist's choice.

Relationships

  • George — The voice he steers by: Lennie's memory drops everything except George's instructions and the dream. His love is imitation, renunciation and pride (‘I got you an' you got me' delights him nightly); his danger is that obedience arrives faster than understanding.
  • Curley — Predator and prey reversed in one scene: Curley picks the big target his boxing logic requires, and Lennie — only under orders — closes the trap. Curley's revenge motive at the end is licensed by this humiliation as much as by his wife's death.
  • Curley's wife — The book's two loneliest listeners find each other in the barn — she talks about Hollywood, he talks about rabbits, neither hears the other. Steinbeck kills her through the one gesture of connection the scene achieves: the invited touch.
  • Crooks — Lennie's guileless entry into Crooks's room — he simply does not process the colour line — gives Crooks his one evening of company, and Crooks repays it with the book's cruellest thought-experiment: ‘S'pose George don't come back no more.'
  • Slim — The puppy-giver and the standard-setter: ‘Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella' is Slim's verdict on Lennie, and the closest the novella comes to an official character reference.

What Lennie Small stands for

  • Soft things — mouse, puppy, hair: the ascending series that structures the book; each is comfort sought and destroyed by the seeking.
  • The rabbits: Lennie's share of the dream is not ownership but tending — a role, a permission, a home for his tenderness; ‘let me tend the rabbits' is the book's purest want.
  • Animal similes — bear, horse, terrier: the world's category for Lennie, prepared from the first page so that his ending can be administered like Candy's dog's — and recognised as such.

Why Steinbeck made Lennie Small

  • To build tragedy without a villain at its centre: Lennie removes intention from harm, forcing the reader to blame systems — the economy, the hierarchy, the absent institutions — rather than a bad actor.
  • To test every other character: how each person treats Lennie (Slim's gentleness, Curley's targeting, Crooks's torment, George's stewardship) is the book's moral X-ray of them.
  • Steinbeck said in a 1937 interview that Lennie was drawn from a real ranch worker he had known, who killed a foreman with a pitchfork after a grievance — the character carries reportage, not fantasy, and the novella's refusal to caricature him is its politics.

Lennie Small — the strongest quotations, analysed

“he walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws.” — Narrator, Chapter 1

The introduction assigns Lennie to the animal register before he speaks a word, and the book never fully releases him from it (‘paws' returns in the fight: ‘Lennie covered his face with his huge paws'). For Section C, aim the observation at the world rather than the technique: a society that reads a man as an animal will fear him as one, work him as one, and put him down as one — the narration is complicit on purpose, teaching us the ranch's own way of seeing.

Methods: animal simile · complicit narration

“Le's do it now. Le's get that place now.” — Lennie, Chapter 6

Lennie's last words collapse the dream's tense from future to present — ‘now' — at the exact moment it becomes impossible forever. George answers ‘Sure, right now. I gotta. We gotta', converting the killing into the journey. The dream ends as it lived: a story two men tell each other instead of a place. No quotation in the book does more work in an essay about hope.

Methods: tense collapse · dramatic irony · euphemism

Readings you could defend

More than one reading of Lennie Small can win the debate. These are the credible alternatives — argue one, and know the others.

  • Innocent or unaccountable? The text insists Lennie never intends harm — but it also shows him lying (the mouse), concealing (the puppy), and knowing enough to hide. Some readers argue Steinbeck gives him exactly enough moral awareness to make the category ‘innocent' uncomfortable, which is more honest than a saintly portrait.
  • A disability-studies reading: Lennie is less a portrait of disability than a mirror for a society with no place for it — the book's real subject is the missing middle ground between the ‘booby hatch' and the lynch mob. Modern readers may also note the novella never gives Lennie's condition a name, sparing him the era's labels.
  • Some critics read Lennie as the dream's true owner: George narrates it, but only Lennie believes it, and belief is what makes it real enough to recruit Candy and tempt Crooks. On this reading, killing Lennie kills the dream not by coincidence but by identity — hope and Lennie were the same character.

Essay arguments

  • Steinbeck engineers escalation as inevitability: mouse, puppy, woman — the reader is trained by repetition to see the ending coming, so the novella's tragedy lies not in surprise but in watching the characters fail to escape a pattern the audience already knows.
  • Lennie is the test the world fails: every institution that should hold him is absent (no asylum but the ‘booby hatch', no policing but the posse, no work but rented strength), so his death indicts 1937 America rather than any individual — the strongest available AO4 argument.
  • The novella's centre is not Lennie's strength but his memory: he forgets everything except the dream and George's instructions, which makes him the book's purest believer — and makes his death the death of belief itself.

Lennie Small in theme essays

  • The dream: Lennie is its believer and its destroyer in one body — the theme's whole tragedy is that these are the same function.
  • Loneliness: he is the only main character who is never lonely — and the price of that exemption is paid by George at the end; the exception proves the theme's rule.
  • Powerlessness: immense physical power, zero social power — Lennie proves the book's hierarchy runs on ownership and category, not muscle.
  • Violence: every act of violence he commits is desired by someone else (George's ‘Get 'im', Curley's provocation, her invitation to touch) — strength as an instrument others play.

Questions that get asked

  • Explore the ways in which Steinbeck presents Lennie in Of Mice and Men. You must consider the context in which the novella was written.
  • ‘Lennie is a victim rather than a danger.' Explore this view of the novella.
  • Explore the significance of dreams in Of Mice and Men.
  • Explore the ways in which Steinbeck presents violence in the novella.

Think you understand it?

Reading is the start. On Incandio a topic counts as mastered only once you have taught it and defended it — the two things a revision guide cannot ask of you.

Incandio this topic → Prove it. Teach it. Defend it. What does “Incandio it” mean?

  1. Teach it — Explain your reading of Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men to Ember, an AI pupil who has not made one, and answer the awkward question. Understanding is credited; wording is not required.
  2. Defend it — Hold your reading of Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men against John Steinbeck in a short, structured debate marked against descriptors you can read first.
  3. Then the exam — 4 authored exam-style questions on Lennie Small, marked on Incandio with the mistake you actually made named.

Completely free. No subscriptions, no paywalls, no account needed to start.

Carry on through Of Mice and Men

Every study of Of Mice and Men