A Potent Snapshot: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

7 September 2026

A Potent Snapshot: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Usually writing my way in to these reviews is pretty straightforward. Sit down. Start writing. Get there. Done. In fact, my book reviews don’t usually take longer than an hour to write; their intention is purely personal: make something of the book so your brain doesn’t turn to mush you remember—and can make something of—what you’ve read. But for some reason, writing into this one feels like pulling teeth.

I ordered this copy of Of Mice and Men when I ordered The Old Man and the Sea because of this short story I’d been writing that’s running 12,000 words and sort of turning into a novella. So it became a little study on novellas: what works, what is the depth and scope, how much can a writer accomplish in a 20k-30k-word piece of writing, etc.? Well, for the past week I’ve been revising and adding to my own short story, and today feels like an excellent time for a little break to inspect John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is a 30k-word novella about two men working on a ranch in Salinas, California: George and Lennie. Lennie is a huge brute of a man with the mental capacity of a small child who likes soft things, like mice and puppies and velvet. George and Lennie need to job-hop because Lennie tends to pet soft things to death. George is Lennie’s keeper, you might say: a brother-not-brother who takes care of him and helps him dream to achieve a softer life.

***Spoiler Alert—this review will discuss the full contents of the book because it must***

In this review, I’ll focus mainly on craft features of Steinbeck’s novella, like the story’s snapshot scope and structure, Steinbeck’s deft employment of flashback and foreshadowing, and then finish by touching on a thematic connection between this novella and The Island of Dr Moreau.

Let’s start with scale. Unlike a novel, which might cover the events of a month or a year, or in the case of The Pillars of the Earth, multiple generations, the novella-length book generally covers just a snapshot: the span of a few days. For example, consider Stephen King’s The Body (later to become a movie titled Stand By Me), where the boys trek to find a dead body over the scope of a few days. The Island of Dr Moreau’s main events take place over the course of a few weeks (only the denouement stretches beyond that). The Old Man and the Sea is about three days. Of Mice and Men adheres to this scope: Lennie and George arrive at this farm midday Friday, and they’re gone by Sunday night of the same weekend. In fact, Lennie has just one opportunity to illustrate his strength in the field on Friday afternoon. Beyond that, the otherwise (rather unfortunately) unstructured and uneventful weekend lays out before them. My own story covers the events of a weekend, too, but with large swaths of flashback to give the reader backstory. I’m not sure if this works—as we’ll cover below, Wells, Hemingway, and Steinbeck all employ very limited flashbacks—but at least the overall scope seems to align with the novella genre/length.

As with The Old Man and the Sea, this story’s structure is extremely simple, following the standard Freytag’s pyramid almost precisely. The story begins in-scene and stays in-scene throughout—because it’s a brief enough timespan that it can. There is no jumping about in time; the plot follows a fairly straight line with only a few gaps in time where nothing noteworthy happens, like when the protagonists are laboring in the field or sleeping.

Also as with The Old Man and the Sea, the story remains in the present the whole time with only a few marked exceptions: when George explains, in dialogue, to first Lennie (who forgot) and then to Candy why they were run off from their last ranch in Weed—because Lennie took hold of a girl’s dress and wouldn’t let go until she started to scream. Sure, there are also some references in dialogue to Lennie’s Aunt Clara, but these are always pretty vague. My point is that absolutely none of the plotline itself shifts to the past in scene. All of Steinbeck’s flashbacks are accomplished via dialogue between characters, which is a unique craft choice. For my own story, which spends large chunks of time in the past/backstory, I jump into memory while my protagonist is either drunk or sleeping. I’m not sure how well this will work. But the fact that, as recommended by Ben Percy in Thrill Me, these canonic authors spend no time in backstory does make me a little uncomfortable because I am choosing otherwise. But we’ll see.

Although Steinbeck spends little time in flashbacks and backstory, he does deliberately employ foreshadowing throughout—from the very, very beginning—to provide the reader with clues. For example, consider the dead mouse in Lennie’s pocket in the first few pages. Consider also this reference to why they ran from the ranch in Weed in the first chapter:

“Jus’ wanted to feel that girl’s dress—jus’ wanted to pet it like it was a mouse—Well, how the hell did she know you just wanted to feel her dress She jerks back and you hold on like it was a mouse. She yells and we got to hide in an irrigation ditch all day with guys lookin’ for us, and we got to sneak out in the dark and get outta the country.” (11)

By the time Curley’s wife appears on the page, we—the readers—are already on edge about her. We know she’s in actual trouble, like the mice and the puppy. But Curley’s wife’s fate is not the only event Steinbeck foreshadows, obviously. Lennie’s fate is also foreshadowed in the mercy killing of Candy’s old sheepdog (right in the back of the head where the skill meets the spine).

What is the impact of such obvious foreshadowing? Well, the reader essentially knows what’s coming, and this creates palpable tension. When Curley’s wife finds Lennie on the floor of the barn with the dead puppy, things seem to go well at first. Lennie keeps his hands to himself while she just yaps at him. This could be ok…? Maybe? Steinbeck forces the reader to live for some five pages in this liminal space of will he do it? Just because we kinda know what’s going to happen doesn’t mean we might not still hope it won’t—and it also forces us to wonder how it will happen. For example, for my own part, even though Lennie’s fate was spelled out by Carlson at the first suggestion that they should handle him like Candy’s old sheepdog, I couldn’t help but wonder of George, Would he? Would he really? The suspicion, the knowing, drew me along through the pages, through the plot, driving the tension in its own unique way.

This brings me to a thematic connection I noticed between Of Mice and Men and The Island of Dr Moreau: man as beast. Both stories employ a blurring between man and animal that I find fascinating. Why is humanity moralized? What makes a man any better than a beast? Is this sentiment that man is greater than beast—even valid? Of course, we have this linkage of certain beasts as helpless victims, between the mice, the puppy, the girl from the ranch in Weed, and Curley’s wife. Then there’s the blurring of lines between the value of life and the mercy of death for both Candy’s old sheepdog and Lennie. But what struck me was that this theme appears also in the way Curley’s wife engages with Crooks, the ranch’s one black stable hand. The second she lights into him, he morphs into a subservient animal:

“Crooks had reduced himself to nothing. There was no personality, no ego—nothing to arouse either like or dislike. He said, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and his voice was toneless.

For a moment she stood over him as though waiting for him to move so that she could whip at him again; but Crooks sat perfectly still, eyes averted, everything that might be hurt drawn in. She turned at last to the other two.” (81)

In this moment, Crooks deliberately turns himself into an inoffensive beast to avoid getting beat—or worse. And for some reason, I found this instance of the black stable hand being perceived and treated as less-than-human even more upsetting than Lennie’s dog-like death. It stuck with me, especially after Crooks was humane enough to invite Lennie into his room to sit with him, and illustrated it is often the people at the top of the chain, people like Curley and his wife, who are the least humane, beastliest of brutes.

As always, I’m sure there are some major aspects of this tale I’ve overlooked in my review. Just as a reminder, I engage in these reflections without first researching others’ thoughts on the literature I read. My intention is to develop my own perspectives before they can be tainted by others’ (perhaps more popular) opinions.

All of that said, it is impressive how much of the world’s wrongs Steinbeck was able to stuff into this brief snapshot of a seemingly standard weekend, and I can’t help but wonder if, like Hemingway, he never intended his story to be symbolic? No, I can’t believe that.

On now to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22!