From the title — an allusion to Robert Burns’ poem “To a Mouse On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with a Plow,” November, 1785 — however, we know that this journey will not be easy. First, Lennie and George have very few skills and resources that will help them attain their dreams. Second, their journey is made even more difficult because Lennie is mentally retarded; his powerful body, his childlike innocence, and his fascination with soft things conspire against him. Finally, Steinbeck fills their journey with obstacles, among them lack of family, cruelty and intimidation, jealousy, fear, loneliness, and self doubt.
What Lennie and George have going for them, though — what separates them from the other people they encounter and what makes the reader willing to take the journey with them — is that they have each other. As Lennie often says to George, “I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you ….” In this way, they are not like the other ranch hands, who “are the loneliest guys in the world.”
When John Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature, his acceptance speech avowed that “… the writer is delegated to declare and celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit — for gallantry in defeat — for courage, compassion, and love.” Lennie and George in Of Mice and Men embody these traits, which, according to Steinbeck, are the “bright rallying flags of hope and of emulation.”
