Of Mice and Men

George Milton

Small, sharp, protective. George both resents and depends on his responsibility for Lennie; his final act is both mercy killing and self-execution of the dream.

Lennie Small

Large, cognitively disabled, incapable of modulating his own strength. His obsession with "soft things" foreshadows every disaster in the novella.

Candy

An aging, one-handed swamper whose dog is shot early in the book - a direct structural parallel to Lennie’s death. Candy’s savings briefly make the dream feel reachable.

Curley

The boss’s son: short, aggressive, newly married. His glove "fulla vaseline" makes him one of Steinbeck’s most viscerally unpleasant minor characters.

Curley’s wife

Unnamed throughout - Steinbeck’s deliberate choice, making her a symbol as much as a person. Lonely, performative, and ultimately a victim of the same isolation the men suffer.

Crooks

The only Black worker on the ranch; segregated to his own room in the harness shed. His brief belief in the dream and its immediate destruction is the novel’s most painful scene.

Slim

The "jerkline skinner": a moral authority whose "majesty… only achieved by royalty and master craftsmen" offers one of the book’s few genuinely decent voices.

“Guys like us… are the loneliest guys in the world.”

- George

Names the novella’s central problem. The line is repeated across the book in slightly different forms, acting as a refrain.

“We got a future. We got somebody to talk to…”

- George

Completes the refrain with the dream of belonging. The repetition emphasises that this dream is partly spoken into existence.

“I got you to look after me, ... you got me to look after you.”

- Lennie

Lennie’s echo of the dream ritual. The reciprocity is, tragically, only real from George’s side.

“Le’s get that place now.”

- Candy

The moment the dream becomes financially concrete - and therefore, in Steinbeck’s pessimistic logic, the moment it begins to die.

“A guy needs somebody… a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.”

- Crooks

Extends the novella’s loneliness theme to the ranch’s most isolated figure. Crooks diagnoses loneliness as a pathology, not a mood.

“You got no rights comin’ in a colored man’s room…”

- Crooks

Crooks both asserts and explains the segregation imposed on him - a micro-history of Jim Crow inside a Californian bunkhouse.

“I coulda made somethin’ of myself… maybe I will yet.”

- Curley’s wife

Her unfulfilled Hollywood dream is a gendered variant of the same American Dream that undoes the men.

“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.”

- Robert Burns (epigraph)

Steinbeck’s title comes from Burns’s poem "To a Mouse". The epigraph announces fatalism before the story even begins.

“I ought to of shot that dog myself, George.”

- Candy

The line Steinbeck uses to prepare George’s final decision - it frames killing Lennie as the most honourable option available.

“I ain’t mad. I never been mad, an’ I ain’t now.”

- George

George’s last words before shooting Lennie. The simple, conversational register makes the moment more devastating.

“An’ live off the fatta the lan’.”

- Lennie (quoting George)

The ritual phrase from the dream, repeated throughout the text to mark its emotional ownership.

“Tell how it’s gonna be.”

- Lennie

Lennie asks for the dream as if for a bedtime story. By the time the request comes on the riverbank, the reader knows exactly what it means.

“Lennie covered his face with huge paws and bleated with terror.”

- Narrator

Steinbeck’s animal imagery for Lennie ("paws", "bleated") is constant. It keeps him sympathetic while reminding us of his dangerous strength.

“She was very pretty and simple, and her face was sweet and young.”

- Narrator (after Curley’s wife’s death)

In death she briefly becomes a person rather than a threat - a small act of authorial mercy with significant critical weight.

“Now, what the hell ya suppose is eatin’ them two guys?”

- Carlson (final line)

The last line of the book. Carlson’s incomprehension seals Steinbeck’s bleak verdict on the world he has described.