Importance Of The Opening In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

An opening plays an enormous role in a story. Not only does it “hook” readers, but it also sets the tone and launches the plot. The opening in Of Mice and Men achieves just that. It starts by describing a setting, a pool of the Salinas River. Steinbeck makes note of the safety and peace of the pool in the opening lines, describing the tone of the setting as warm, twinkling, golden, strong, and fresh. Further into the opening of Of Mice and Men you realize the diction when the two characters, Lennie and George, are introduced. When the two men speak, their diction sounds very uneducated, sometimes difficult to understand or read. Their vocabulary is also simple and includes a lot of slang. The opening introduces its readers to an important setting, a pool of the Salinas River, tone, safe and peaceful, and the diction, uneducated and substandard.
In Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the main themes presented are loneliness, friendship, the nature of dreams, and eventually how these three affect and form human
society, the man being Lennie. Many see Lennie as the “bad guy”, but it is really everyone else that pushes and taunts him. Lennie doesn’t realize his own strength and when he pets the soft and pretty things he loves, “… I like to pet nice things with my fingers, sof’ things”, whether a mouse or a girl, he pets it too hard and they end up dying. George works so hard to take care of Lennie, and they’re both protective of each other. When Lennie kills Curly’s wife, George has to make a tough decision that may just be the most loyal and protective action ha can take. He has to kill Lennie to keep him from hurting others and himself. In the end of Of Mice and Men, George shoots him out of love. The last words George and Lennie spoke together were about the dream that they shared, the one society would never let them have, and then Lennie dies with a