Loneliness In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

The Effect of Loneliness Have you ever been lonely? For someone to be lonely, it means that he or she is a stranger to interaction and doesn’t have anybody to talk to. Loneliness can be caused by many different types of discrimination. Loneliness appears in today’s world in different cases. In Of Mice and Men, the characters that present the theme of loneliness are Candy, Curley’s wife, George, and Crooks.

Candy is lonely because of his old age. He is rejected by the people of the ranch due to him being old and handicapped. His only company is his faithful dog companion who later in the story is killed by Carlson. Candy response was "You seen what they done to my dog tonight? They says he wasn't no good to himself nor nobody else. When they can me here I wisht somebody'd shoot me. But they won't do nothing like that. I won't have no place to go, an' I can't get no more jobs.”(Steinbeck, 60) This quote really symbolizes the suffering that Candy goes through and how the men were willing to kill the old dog, while letting the old guy suffer. This also leads to Candy wanting to join George and Lennie on there dream to own their own ranch.

Curley's wife is another character in the
Numerous times in the story he says how he always frowned upon by the other workers because of his skin color. He’s seen as the main target of this because he is the only black man on the ranch and he is forced to live alone in a shed of the barn. This isolation that Crooks displays makes him prejudice and angry at any white men because he thinks they all share the same mind frame about black people. He shows this when Lennie enter his room after playing around with his pup and he notices Crook’s light on in his room "You got no right to come in my room. This here's my room. Nobody got any right in here but me." (Steinbeck, 68) After that he goes on to try to make Lennie realize how he has felt almost all his