True Friendship In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

True Friendship In John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men, George and Lennie are best friends and migrant farmers. George takes care of Lennie because Lennie is mentally challenged. After Lennie gets in trouble in Weed, George and Lennie go to a new ranch to work. There Lennie gets into a fight with Curley, the boss’s son, kills a puppy, and kills Curley’s wife. Because of these unfortunate events, George kills Lennie. George does the right thing by killing Lennie because not only does George save Lennie from a lot of pain, but he also prevents Lennie from being locked up and being unhappy and confused. One reason George should have killed Lennie is because if George didn’t kill Lennie, Curley would have made Lennie’s death more painful than it should be. This is shown when Curley says, “I’ll shoot ‘im in the guts” (Steinbeck 96). This quote shows that Curley was going to shoot Lennie in the guts instead of in the back of the head, which is less painful and a quicker death. Another example is Candy explains, “Curley gon’ta wanta get ‘im lynched.
However, then Lennie would be unhappy and confused for the rest of his life because he wouldn’t understand why he’s locked up. In the novel, Slim questions, “...s’pose they lock him up an’ strap him down and put him in a cage. That ain’t no good, George” (Steinbeck 97). Slim points out that even if he is locked up, there would be the chance that he would be unhappy and treated wrong. Also George says, “Lennie never done it in meanness… All the time he done bad things, but he never don one of ‘em mean” (Steinbeck 95). This shows that Lennie never does anything out of meanness and wouldn’t understand why he’s locked up because he didn’t mean do anything wrong. So, even if Lennie would have been locked up instead of being killed it would have been worse than Lennie being