Foreshadowing In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

In John Steinbeck’s novel “Of Mice and Men” Steinbeck expertly uses foreshadowing to prelude many surprising events in the ending. From the very beginning we can predict what will happen to the two main characters: Lennie and George. It is used to hint at future events concerning Lennie’s death.
First, Steinbeck uses foreshadowing to hint at Curley's wife's’ death and that Lennie killed her through the mouse's death early in the novel, and the dog's death mere pages before. Lennie had killed the mouse as he had the puppy. He was killing and killing bigger and bigger things. His Aunt Clara had known that eventually he would kill again and had stopped giving him things to “play with”, did she know that he would have to be stopped? “An’ she stopped
givin’ ‘em to ya. You always killed ‘em.” (pg 9) She had stopped giving them to Lennie because maybe in the deep recesses of her mind she knew that he would continue to kill, even unintentionally. Also, Lennie knew that George would be mad at him. What he didn’t know was that George was able to end his life. “Ain’t you gonna give me hell?” (pg 103) Here, it shows that Lennie knows that George is angry at him and he’s confused as to why George hasn’t started yelling at him. He knows that he has done a bad thing and he knows that he was going to have to pay for it. Another thing that we can predict using Steinbeck's foreshadowing is how Lennie dies.
Lennie dies with a single bullet wound to the back of the head.
Same as Candy’s old dog. “I ought to of shot that dog myself, George, I shouldn’t ought to of let no stranger shoot my dog.” (pg 61). In this metaphor, Candy is George and Candy’s dog is Lennie. When Lennie kills Curley’s wife George knows that Curley is going to kill Lennie. But he was not going to let “some stranger” shoot him. He was going to do that himself, that way he would die in peace instead of like Curley would have done. “I’ll kill the son-of-a-bitch myself. I’ll shoot ‘im in the guts.” (pg 96) Here, Curley makes it known to all that he was going to make Lennie suffer and George was not about to let him do that. Perhaps because Lennie was already dead to him. Meaning that we also know from foreshadowing that George will always be the one to kill
Lennie.
We know that George killed Lennie, and we could predict that he would from the hint of a shadow at the beginning of the novel where Lennie has a mouse.
Lennie had a mouse that was dead and George threw it “across to the other side”. “ George took the mouse and threw it across the pond to the other side among the brush.” (pg 6) Here, Lennie is the mouse, George is George and Curley and the others are Lennie. In the beginning George takes the mouse and throws it to the other side he takes care of it before Lennie can. In the same way George killed Lennie before Curley could and he “took care of it”. George took care of the mouse by throwing it to the “other side” since he killed Lennie and death is referred to as the “other side”. Correspondingly, that the mouse might be dead, Lennie could have been already dead to George-as soon as he saw Curley’s wife’s body lying on the ground. He knew that he would have to kill Lennie and maybe he always did. “I guess maybe way back in my head I did.” (pg 94) Perhaps that was why he could kill Lennie, because he knew that Curley would, that he would have to kill him and in that respect Lennie was already
dead.
In conclusion John Steinbeck used foreshadowing to prelude 3 major aspects of Lennie’s death all the way through the novel. He used mice as a metaphor to Lennie and preluded his death through many different ways and animals. He also foreshadowed that Lennie would have to be stopped and only George could do it.