Loneliness In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

Being lonely is a difficult and painful feeling. Nobody around you understands what you are going through and you feel as if nothing will ever change. In John Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice and Men, two men in the 1930’s travel to a California town called Soledad to work on a ranch. On this ranch many of the people are lonely. Loneliness is a reoccurring theme portrayed by the characters throughout the story.
One form of loneliness is being physically separated from others and having nobody to talk to. Crooks, a stable buck on the ranch in Soledad, is a crippled black man who is not allowed to sleep in the same living quarters as the other workers. In the 1930’s , black people were still segregated from white people, and being the only black worker meant he was all alone. Crooks confessed that “A guy needs somebody ‒ to be near him” (Steinbeck 72). When not working, other men on the ranch are playing cards and horseshoes, or just talking with each other in their bunkhouse. Crooks, on the other hand, sits in his room in the barn and reads by himself. He is not invited to play with

the other men and does not talk to them. Being so isolated from others could easily make a man go insane.
Another lonely ranch worker is an old man named Candy.

He is a swamper, which means he does small jobs cleaning up around the farm. He cannot work too much because he is missing a hand which he lost in a farming accident years ago. Since he is old and does not get much work done having only one hand, he does not have much time left before he gets fired. The closest thing Candy had to family was his dog, but it was shot and killed because it was old and suffering. After losing his dog, Candy wished that when he gets fired somebody would shoot him and end his suffering, just like what was done to his dog. He would have no family to. Nobody would hire an old man with one hand, so he would not be able to find another job. Candy sees no point in living once he is out of work (Steinbeck 60). Depending only on a job that is near an end and having no relatives to go to would be extremely

lonely.
The owner of the ranch has a son named Curley. Curley is married to a woman whose name was never stated through the entirety of the story. This was no accident, however. Curley’s wife is seen as a tramp by the workers on the farm because she constantly flirting and trying to talk with them. She is lonely, and because of this she tries to talk with men other than her husband. The men ignore her because they do not want to get caught with the wife of the boss’s son. She claims that she, “never get[s] to talk to nobody… [and becomes] awful lonely” (Steinbeck 86). Curley is protective over his wife and does not allow her to leave the farm. She is the only woman and is not given the chance to have a friend. Curley’s wife tries her best to avoid loneliness, but it seems there is no escaping it.
The character in Of Mice and Men are lonely. If the people around them understood what the lonely characters were going through they could have done something to help. For Crooks, the men could have allowed him to live in their bunkhouse. Candy could have been given a place to go once he is fired. Curley could give his wife some space and not be overprotective. The town the story takes place in is called Soledad. The meaning of Soledad is loneliness, so Steinbeck intentionally made the connection between the setting and the characters. In life, people could be suffering from something others are unaware of, just a in literature.