How Does Steinbeck Present Juxtaposition In Of Mice And Men

The American dream is the ideal that every US citizen should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative. Even though the dream does not discriminate, people during the 1930s did. During this time period multiple groups of individuals were excluded from this iconic dream. In John Steinbeck's novella Of Mice and Men he exposes the ageism, sexism, racism, and ableism in the 1930s. Steinbeck’s use of allusion, metaphor, symbolism, and juxtaposition create archetypes of the most commonly discriminated against people during the 1930s. In the Poem “To A Mouse,” Robert Burns writes about how a mouse spent the bulk of his year building a house to protect the mouse from the cold, frail winter. A farmer accidentally plows the tiny house over while working in the fields. The farmer states “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”(Burns). About two hundred years later John Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men. Through the title referencing the the poem an audience can infer that this is an allusion that foreshadow plans ending badly. In this case the widely established American dream is

Specifically Steinbeck used juxtaposition to expose how racism was ignorant. Juxtaposition is the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect. Crooks was juxtaposed because his room was described to have a lot of books and items; while during the 1930s African Americans were viewed having limited material items and little to no education. An example of the juxtaposition from the book is, “Crooks possessed several pairs of shoes,a pair of rubber boots, a big alarm clock, and a single barreled shotgun.”(steinbeck 67). The purpose of the juxtaposition was to characterize crooks differently from how minorities were typically perceived, which seemed to be difficult to do during this time