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Discuss Steinbeck's adept use of foreshadowing
Discuss Steinbeck's adept use of foreshadowing
Literary analysis of mice and men
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In the novel Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck two men, George and Lennie, are trying to earn enough money to make their dream come true. In the beginning of the novel George and Lennie are running away from a town called Weed and traveling to a new farm for work. They are dropped of a few miles from the farm and come across a little pond where they spend the night. George knowing that Lennie is mentally delayed tells him that if he gets in trouble,which he will, to come back to this exact spot. While they are at the farm many things happen, they meet the farm owner’s son ,Curley, and his wife, who is very lonely and tries to get attention, they also tell they dream to the swamper, Candy, who is very excited and wants to be part of this dream. Later in the story Lennie is approached by Curley’s …show more content…
wife and she is causing trouble unintentionally, Lennie ends up breaking her neck accidentally and retreats to the spot where George told him to wait. A search party goes out looking for him and is out to kill, George being a great friend finds him and distracts while he kills him without hurting Lennie. Steinbeck is a master of foreshadowing, he uses it so effectively that when the reader is reading the story they can make accurate predictions of what will happen in the end. The most blatant use of the effect foreshadowing is in the first few pages of the book when George tells Lennie to come back to the pond if anything bad should happen. He tells Lennie, “ if jus’ happen to get in trouble like you always done before, I want you to come right here an’ hide in the brush.” (15) This is a great way to use foreshadowing because Steinbeck uses the pairs past experience to show a pattern in the pairs life, therefore giving the reader an idea of what will happen later in the novel. Another use of foreshadowing in the book is the death of Candy’s dog. The men in the bunkhouse try to persuade Candy to let them kill his dog because he is smelly and useless. Carlson tells Candy he will shoot the dog in the back of the head and he will not feel a thing. Candy gives in and immediately regrets it he later tells George, “I oughtta shot that dog myself,”(61). Steinbeck puts this part in the book to foreshadow the future event of George killing Lennie himself and not letting Curley and the other men make him suffer. Steinbeck shows the friendship between George and Lennie by using the effect of foreshadowing. Steinbeck also uses foreshadowing when Crooks tells Candy,” I seen it happen too many times.
I seen too many guys with land in their head. They never get none under their hand” (76). Crooks is telling Candy you will probably not get the land because he has seen people try but they never succeed. He is right Lennie and George end up never getting their plot of land. This use you might not notice at first, but if you look back you will notice Steinbeck cleverly hid this use of foreshadowing. The use of foreshadowing is very useful in a story, because it can make the endings of books either surprising or give it a sense of completeness. In The novel Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech, she uses foreshadowing throughout the whole book, but the reader doesn’t realize until the very end of the book when she finds out her mom is dead. This literally makes the reader gasp out loud in shock. Opposingly in Of Mice and Men the reader has a sense of what will happen in the end. Steinbeck uses foreshadowing in a more blatant or open way in which the reader can notice or acknowledge the effect of foreshadowing throughout the story. Both uses are very effective and make any story
better. Mrs. Margaret Cadaver
“The best laid schemes o’ mice and men, Gang aft agley often go wrong, And leave us nought but grief and pain, For promised joy!” Robert Burn’s quote makes us believe that even the best laid out plans for joy often go wrong and brings us grief and pain. George and Lennie’s plan was for a better future. The future where they didn’t take commands from someone; where they took care of themselves. As George and Lennie keep talking about the farm and more people joining in on the plan, it looks like it might happen. But with the foreshadowing through this quote: “Look, Lennie. I want you to look around here. You can remember this place, can’t you? The ranch is about a quarter mile up that way. Just follow the river. (15)” This quote foreshadows Lennie messing up and it creating a larger gap between the dream farm and them. When Lennie kills Curley's wife, the idea of the dream farm slowly starts to disappear. As George finds out about what had happen, he realizes that plan for a farm was just an idea, an illusion. “—I think I knowed from the very first. I think I knowed we’d never do her. He usta like to hear about it so much I got to thinking maybe we would”
Dreams give people motivation and a sense of hope to not give up when life's hard conditions get in the way of success. In the novella, Of Mice and Men, George Milton has his own “American Dream” where he will live in a house, that he bought with his hard earned money, with Lennie. They will grow their own crops and own farm animals to feed themselves. This dream keeps George motivated to find new jobs when Lennie gets them into trouble. George does not want to give up on working hard and making money on ranches.
In the novel, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, foreshadowing is used a great deal throughout the whole story. From the beginning to the end, it appears everywhere hinting on what will happen in order to make the book more enjoyable. It was used to show that Lennie will be getting into trouble with Curley's wife, the death of Lennie, and exactly how he dies.
Have you ever watched a movie and knew what the ending was before it was over? Characters from the story use foreshadowing to hint on what will happen in the future. There are many examples of foreshadowing that John Steinbeck creates in Of MIce and Men. some key uses of foreshadowing that Steinbeck uses in Of MIce and Men are there wishes of the ranch but their plans going askew, how curley's wife will die, how they will not get the ranch, and lastly how lennie will die.
In California, two friends travel together to attempt to achieve their life long dream of owning their own farm. As they are traveling, they encounter situations that affect their future plans. During the Great Depression, George and Lennie, the main characters, begin searching for work to pay for their dream. As they search for work, George notices that Lennie can’t control his own strength. When they find work, they face many problems on the job especially with the bosses son, Curley. In Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck uses Foreshadowing as a unifying device to reveal future events that may occur later in the story.
In the book, Of Mice and Men there were plenty of conflicts in the book. There were two different conflicts external conflict and internal conflicts. One of the external conflicts was between Candy and Carlson because Carlson wanted to kill Candy’s dog. Carlson thinks the dog is useless, old, and it stinks that is why Carlson wants to kill the dog. After thinking about it in the book it says “a long time at Slim to try to find some reversal, (Steinbeck)” Candy finally came to his senses and told Carlson to go take the dog’s life.
Life for ranchers in the 1930’s was very lonely. They have no family, and they do not belong anywhere. They come to the ranch, earn their pay, go into town, waste their money, and start all over again at another ranch. They have nothing to look forward to. But George and Lennie are different; it is not like that for them because they have each other. It was George and Lennie’s dream to own a piece of land and a farm. That dream is long gone. In the story, Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, Curley caused the death of his wife and Lennie’s death; Curley also shattered George and Lennie’s dream.
‘Of Mice and Men’, a novel by John Steinbeck, tells a story of friendship, loneliness and aspirations. Two itinerants named George and Lennie go to work on a farm as labourers in a place named Soledad. The story then ends when George takes Lennie’s life. Almost everyone on the farm is lonely and the person that represents this the most is Curley’s (the boss’s son) wife, one of the most pivotal characters in the book. When Lennie and George arrive on the farm and are shown their quarters Curley’s wife, on one of her ‘looking for Curley’ routines, sees them both and immediately starts flirting with them. George gets angry when Lennie takes a shine to her and tell him to stay away and calls her a ‘bitch’ and a ‘rat-trap’ This view is also held by many of the workers on the farm. Curley instantly takes a dislike to Lennie when he firsts meets him just because he his much considerably larger that himself. This attitude towards Lennie results in him getting into a fight with him but he loses when Lennie crushes his hand with his own fist. Curley’s wife knows Lennie did this even though Curly was told to say he had caught his hand in a machine. Curley’s wife pursuit of company leads her to seek solace with Lennie. She pours out her pent up frustration of her unrealised dreams and ambitions. When she realises Lennie isn’t taking much interest she lets him feel her hair. Lennie being Lennie strokes harder and harder even though Curley’s wife begs him to stop. As she struggled to get out of his grasp he accidentally broke her neck. Lennie then ran off to his hiding place where he was told to go if he ever did a ‘bad thing.’ When Curley discovers his wife’s body he runs after Lennie with a mob including George. This leads to George pulling a trigger on Lennie.
When Lennie and George encounter Slim, another ranch hand, they automatically respect him and react positively towards him. “This was Slim, the jerkline skinner. His hatchet face was ageless. He might have been thirty-five or fifty. His ear heard more than was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought. His hands, large and lean, were as delicate in their action as those of a temple dancer.” (Steinbeck, 33-34) Slim is the noblest of the ranch as the only character who seems to be at peace with his circumstances and his life. The other characters view slim as wise and respectable man and often go to him for guidance, as the only person who has achieved what he wants in life.
Foreshadowing is used in many novels, but S.E Hinton uses this perfectly. She makes the foreshadowing easy to find. She also uses foreshadowing many times throughout the story. Most of the foreshadowings in her novel was crucial to the story. Foreshadowing is important to many stories. They move the plot a long and make to story possible. Some foreshadowing are so important, like in S.E Hinton’s The Outsiders. Without Johnny having the blade, he wouldn’t have been able to kill Bob. There would be no story without Bob being dead. Foreshadowing is an important part of literacy and makes the novel more
Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan states that, "in the state of nature mans life is nasty, brutish and short". In depression era America, no greater truth could be said. There were millions unemployed, largely unskilled and living on the margins of society. The lowest of the low were the migrant labourers travelling from place to place trying to scratch a living. They often had to travel illegally by freight car with all its consequent dangers. Their life expectancy was low, crime was rampant and despair was a fellow traveller. This is the setting of John Steinbeck's, 'Of Mice and Men'.
Everyone has a dream they hope to achieve, but dreams are not always possible to attain. In John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, two ranch hands, George and Lennie, find work in Salinas Valley. Lennie, constantly getting into trouble, inadvertently causes the two of them to be run out of town and thus have to find new work regularly. George and Lennie's search for work in the hope of accomplishing their dream of a small farm of their own displays how futile realizing dreams can be.
'I see hundreds of men come by on the road an' on the ranches with
What is the point of dreaming? Dreams guide humans to persevere and create a better life for themselves. However, dreams can not always be achieved. The death of dreams can have just as much effect on a person as the birth of one and oftentimes decide how a person view the world around them. A person’s dreams, whether close or far, can die without a second’s notice. In John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the death of dreams has devastating effects on the lives of Curley’s Wife, Crooks, and George and Lennie.
a better way of life - but something always seems to get in the way of