Grade 9 Notes: Of Mice and Men
Of Mice and Men is examined closed-book, so these notes are built for memorisation with purpose: every quotation is short, and every quotation is attached to an argument about the text or its world — because on this paper (4ET1 Section C) AO1 (personal response) and AO4 (context) are the only objectives that score. Revise character by character, then read the structure section until you can argue from the book's design: six scenes, one circle, and a dream built to break.
Character studies
George Milton
The small man who carries a big man — and the price of the carrying
George is the novella's centre of consciousness without ever being its narrator: ‘small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes’, a competent ranch hand whose one deviation from the itinerant norm is that he travels with someone. Steinbeck builds him from two competing registers — the complaint (‘I could get along so easy and so nice if I didn't have you on my tail’) and the litany (‘I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you’) — and the whole book is the pressure test that decides which one is true. His killing of Lennie is the ending every earlier scene rehearses; whether it is mercy, defeat, or both at once is the finest judgement the exam can ask of you.
Lennie Small
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.
Curley's wife
The only woman on the ranch — never named, endlessly labelled
She is the novella's boldest structural decision: in a book where every man has a name, she is only ‘Curley's wife' — a possession in her own designation. The men file her under labels before she speaks (‘tart', ‘tramp', ‘jail bait', ‘rattrap'), and Steinbeck lets the reader inherit those labels — then dismantles them in Chapter 5, when she finally gets a listener and turns out to be a lonely, thwarted girl with a dead dream of the movies and a marriage two weeks old that she already regrets. Her death is the plot's trigger, but her life is the book's sharpest piece of context: what 1930s ranch America offered a young working-class woman, and what it cost her to be the only one of her kind on the property.
Crooks
The ranch's one Black man — segregated, book-read, and armoured in pride
Crooks, the ‘stable buck', is the novella's study of segregation practised as ordinary routine: he sleeps alone in a harness-room off the barn, is barred from the bunkhouse games, and has ‘reduced himself to nothing' as a survival method. Steinbeck gives him the book's best-furnished interior — books, a ‘mauled copy of the California civil code for 1905', gold-rimmed spectacles — and its most damaged spine, ‘crooked' by a horse's kick: a man of intelligence and property rights on paper, denied both in practice. His one chapter of company (Chapter 4) runs the novella's whole argument in miniature: hope enters his room, expands him, and is evicted by a threat — after which he withdraws his offer to join the farm, because he has remembered what dreaming costs a man in his position.
Candy
The old swamper counting the days until the ranch discards him
Candy is the ranch's oldest hand and its clearest forecast: one-handed (the machine took the other, on this property), demoted to sweeping, and fully aware of the arithmetic — ‘They'll can me purty soon.' Steinbeck pairs him with an ancient, stinking, once-great sheepdog and then has the dog shot for the crime of being old, so that Candy can say the book's most load-bearing sentence about his own future. His $350 — compensation for the hand, plus savings — is the plot's pivot: it converts the farm from liturgy to plan, and makes Candy the dream's investor, its most desperate believer, and its chief mourner. In an era with no pension, no disability provision and the county poorhouse as the last stop, Candy is AO4 walking: everything he fears existed, and everything he hopes for did not.
Curley
The boss's son — small, entitled, and spoiling for a target
Curley is the ranch's only heir and its least secure man: a lightweight boxer who ‘hates big guys', newly married and already patrolling his wife like property he suspects of walking off. Steinbeck builds him as pure aggression with structural immunity — he can start any fight because his father owns the ground it happens on — and then has Lennie destroy his hand, converting the bully into the avenger who leads the final hunt. He is the closest the novella has to a villain, and it is a measure of the book's design that even he is explicable: rank without respect, marriage without affection, and a small man's terror of being laughed at.
Slim
The prince of the ranch — earned authority, and the book's court of appeal
Slim, the jerkline skinner, is the one man the ranch obeys without a title: ‘the prince of the ranch', whose ‘word was taken on any subject, be it politics or love'. Steinbeck writes him half a register above everyone else — ‘majesty', ‘God-like eyes', hands ‘delicate in their action as those of a temple dancer' — and uses him as the book's court: he rules on the dog, ratifies the George–Lennie bond as natural rather than suspicious, and delivers the final verdict at the riverbank: ‘You hadda, George.' Whether his authority is wisdom or merely the best this brutal world can produce — a judge whose rulings are all death sentences — is one of the novella's quietest open questions.
Thesis statements
- Of Mice and Men is not the story of a dream that fails but of a dream that works: Steinbeck shows the farm recruiting four believers, acquiring capital and setting a date, so that the novella's indictment falls on an economy that issued the dream to men it had already priced out of it.
- By staging the ending's ethics two chapters early on an animal — same weapon, same method, same argument that it is a kindness — Steinbeck ensures that the reader reaches the riverbank already holding a verdict, and then makes us apply it to a man.
- The novella's tragedy is categorical rather than personal: George's Chapter 1 definition of ‘guys like us' is a class description from which he claims exemption, and the last chapter's ‘I'll work my month an' I'll take my fifty bucks' is the system closing its final gap.
- Steinbeck's ranch runs on a chain of cruelty rather than a hierarchy of villains — a woman humiliated by the men threatens a Black man with lynching, and an old man curses her corpse — so the novella can indict 1930s America without ever supplying a bigot to blame.
- Curley's wife is the novella's experiment on its own reader: by rationing her interiority to a single late scene, Steinbeck makes us inhabit the men's misjudgement for four chapters and then convicts us of it in the four sentences that describe her death.
- Crooks is the novella's decisive evidence about hope: the one character with statistical, first-hand and lifelong immunity to the dream catches it within a page, which relocates the book's argument from economics to psychology.
- Steinbeck's refusal to narrate George's mind at the moment of the killing is the novella's central moral device: the behaviourist camera that has reported the whole book hands the verdict to the reader precisely where an author would normally deliver it.
Essay plans
- Explore the ways in which Steinbeck presents loneliness in Of Mice and Men. You must consider the context in which the novella was written. — Steinbeck presents loneliness not as a mood but as an output of the itinerant ranch economy: he defines it as a class condition in Chapter 1, distributes it by cause across four characters, and then closes the novella by cancelling the one exemption the book allowed — so that the final chapter is less a bereavement than an enrolment.
- ‘The dream of the farm was never possible.' Explore this view of Of Mice and Men. — The proposition is largely right but for the wrong reason: the novella does not show a fantasy collapsing under its own implausibility — it shows a dream that worked, recruited and very nearly bought land, and Steinbeck's harder argument is that hope was the most efficient instrument by which the Depression economy extracted labour from men it had no intention of paying.
- ‘George's killing of Lennie is an act of love.' Explore this view of the ending of the novella. — Steinbeck constructs the ending so that love is the most defensible reading and never a complete one: he rehearses the act on a dog, supplies the principle through Candy's regret, removes every alternative through Curley's promise, and then withholds George's mind at the decisive moment — so the novella asks not whether the killing was loving but whether a world in which this was the loving option deserves the acquittal Slim hands out.