[Essay in My Heart]

Of Mice and Men

‘Of Mice and Men’, published by John Steinbeck in 1937, was translated as ‘생쥐와 인간’ in Korean. I personally feel that there are many differences between the content and title of this novel. The author's intention in choosing the title remains a mystery to me.

Of Mice and Men tells the story of a farm in the Salinas Valley near Monterrey, a city on the northern coast of California. The main characters, George, and Lennie make a living as migrant workers who move from one farm to another. George lives by taking care of Lennie, who has difficulty in thinking normally. This novel contains several episodes that occur as George and Lennie bump into and work with various workers in the bunker house, a farm worker's residence.

This work vividly shows the daily conversations and psychological descriptions between people with various personalities living on the farm, and also shows how many people with their own unique personalities live together in a limited space. Some of the first words that come to mind while reading this book are dreams, friendship, love, loneliness, racism, sympathy, compassion, family, violence, problems with the elderly, animals and humans, social reality, physical and mental health.

George and Lennie had a simple dream of saving some money from their work and later building their own little farm. The story of their dream, which they used to inflate to the people they worked with on the farm, accidentally reached the ears of the wife of Curley, the farmer's son, who had always suffered from loneliness and was not attracted to the boring farm life. Lennie's sudden and careless act while talking to Curley's wife in the barn results in her sudden death. Lennie's control over his emotions, memories, and movements was not good, so Lennie was always under George's care.

A big commotion breaks out on the farm to find a killer, and Lennie escapes alone. Lennie, who was hiding alone in the mountains, was eventually discovered by George, and after talking to each other intensively, he eventually died wretchedly and pitifully at the hands of George, and as George and his companions descend into town, the story ends.

Steinbeck expresses the landscapes of northern California mountains, villages, farms, roads, etc., poetically, using various vocabulary, very delicately and precisely for the backgrounds that appear in several episodes. The workers' conversation is very rough and ungrammatical. There is a lot of swearing and a lot of words are abbreviated or modified, but it is not too difficult to grasp the overall meaning or context. Lennie really wants to raise rabbits and other animals on the farm of his dreams. Perhaps Steinbeck chose mice as the representative animals and inserted them into the title of the novel, 'Of Mice and Men', meaning 'Of Animals and Men' I personally think. Various animals such as horses, rabbits, dogs, and chickens appear in the novel, and in particular, the story of a very old, toothless dog that was being cared for by a farmworker metaphorically expresses the problem of human aging and death.

By reading this novel, I got to know a little more concretely about the daily life of a traditional American western ranch. Many issues such as racism, social alienation, loneliness, prejudice against the elderly and the disabled, fair and effective social welfare, euthanasia, and the rise of the concept of the disintegrating family and single-family, which still exist in American society, are addressed by an 'American's gifted storyteller’ John Steinbeck. Through this novel, he foresaw these issues long ago and asked the questions to his readers.

I think it's a book worth reading lightly at least once in the deepening autumn. ***

From the desk of Soongseonjae Pavilion

November 6, 2021

Solti

한국어 번역: https://www.ktown1st.com/blog/VALover/18237