Relationships In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

A mother and daughter, boyfriend and girlfriend, a loser and his Yu-Gi-Oh cards, relationships can be found everywhere; including the novella Of Mice and Men. Of Mice and Men is a realistic fiction novella written by John Steinbeck. Throughout the novella there are several examples of different kinds of relationships which in “Living in Sym” has discussed and explained. Three relationships types found in the novella are mutualistic, quasi-pathogenic, and commensalistic.

Of Mice and Men has the plot of two migrant workers named George and Lennie who are in Salinas Valley, California, during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl. Lennie is shown to be mentally disabled, and society is working against George and Lennie as they have had to move from place to place because of some of

A pathogenic relationship is when a disease or pathogen disables or kills its host, but in this case it wasn’t a disease. The pathogen in Of Mice and Men would be the combination of the Dust Bowl, and the Great Depression. The host is the Great Plains. This is a pathogenic relationship because the Dust Bowl has torn up most of the land in the southern great plains and disabled farmers from farming. This, in combination with the Great Depression, caused people to leave the Plains to search for places where they could work, migrating to the west and to the east. The Great Depression contributed to the disability of the Plains because prices for crops was dropping to an all time low, while prices for everything else was rising. The farmers would have to lower their prices immensely for them to be able to sell the crops, but even so most people in the U.S.A could not afford the food; therefore, the farmers didn’t make much money even if they did manage to successfully farm so they still had to go elsewhere to look for work. The Plains was disabled like this for almost a decade before the Dust Bowl finally