Instinct In Of Mice And Men

One’s Best Instinct Is Often All They Have

We live in a world where anything can happen that results in a positive or negative outcome. The outcome is based on someone’s first instinct, their reaction. In John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men, he emphasizes the physical and vocal responses of Lennie and Crooks when they’re placed in uncomfortable situations. The story of these characters who are positioned in the time of The Great Depression leads them into “threatening” conditions where they have to think fast, regardless of what it would impact. By using the characters Crooks and Lennie, Steinbeck produces the idea that sometimes our first instinct can make a problematic situation have a negative outcome even when a positive one is within

First and foremost, when Lennie feels as if his dream would be ruined by Curley’s wife, he aggressively uttered, “I don’t want you to yell. You gonna get me in trouble jus’ like George says you will” (91). By showing Lennie’s reaction to Curley’s wife struggling to get out of his sturdy grip, Steinbeck is proving how when the slow, bear-like character feels as if his dream of tending rabbits is at risk of disintegrating, he instinctively protects himself. Needless to say, Lennie is working for his and George’s goal to later own their own land and doesn’t want anyone to get in the way of that; consequently, in Lennie’s attempt to silence Curley’s wife, he kills her. Furthermore, while explaining to Slim what happened in Weed, George mentions, “an’ by that time Lennie’s so scared all he can think to do is just hold on” (41). Lennie being the slow, demented person he is, has the instinct to grab onto things with a solid grip when he gets spooked, which Steinbeck foreshadows through the story up until the incident with Curley’s wife. This action Lennie took defines him as a self-preserved person, since he did what he felt would stop anything worse from happening, even though it cause George and Lennie to later go on the run. As a result, Lennie followed his first instinct in which lead to a terrible ending, similar to the route Crooks almost traveled