The American Dream in Of Mice and Men by John Stienbeck

The American Dream started off as propaganda in order to make the American people of the early twentieth century work harder to build a successful economy. The idea of the American Dream is that every American citizen has an equal opportunity of making money along with owning a large house, some land, and having a family with kids. In Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck illustrates that the American Dream, no matter how simple is impossible to achieve. As everyone has their own interpretation of the American Dream, Steinbeck uses George and Lennie, Crooks, and Curley’s Wife to demonstrate how the American Dream is impossible to achieve and how important the dream was for people so they could carry on with their lives.
As George and Lennie have been travelling around together since the death of Lennie’s Aunt Clara the two have build a dream in which they discuss how they in-vision their lives once their done working. “O.K. Someday – we’re gonna get the jack together and we’re gonna have a little house and a couple of acres, an’ a cow and some pigs and-” (Steinbeck 16). Both George and Lennie share a dream in which they will one day have saved up enough money to buy their own farm and live the rest of their days together so that when they work they will be working for themselves and to be able do whatever they want on their own terms. Even though George and Lennie have been working toward their dream for a long time it is still a challenge for them to achieve it with Lennie’s disabilities and him getting them run out of Weed. “God a'mighty, if I was alone I could live so easy. I could go get a job an' work, an' no trouble. No mess at all, and when the end of the month come I could take my fifty bucks and go into town and g...

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...most to achieve. George and Lennie can never live out their dream as during Lennie’s life he made it to difficult to keep a job because of his disabilities and when he dies ends the dream of ever being able to happen. Steinbeck also illustrates the difficulty of black men achieving their dream through Crooks. Crooks is just like every other men of the farm he is seen as weaker (due to his skin colour) to all the others giving him an unfair advantage of obtaining his dream. Finally, Steinbeck uses Curley’s wife to demonstrate how woman were seen as more of a material object then a person in this time period which just like Crooks gives her an unfair advantage of achieving her dream. In the end, none of the characters in Of Mice and Men are able to achieve their goal due to one of their personal issues or one of the many social limitations around this time.