How does Steinbeck present America in the novella Of Mice and Men?
Steinbeck incluses the novella from the very first words so straight away he is presenting America also he uses dramatic visualisations to help show America through description of the landscape and uses Chekov’s gun as he inserts the ‘rabbit’ a random image into the story.
America is presented through description as Steinbeck says “there is a path through the willows and among the sycamores, a path beaten hard by boys coming down from the ranches to swim in the deep pool”. That gives you an idea of what type of landscape they are at and that the background of a typical ranch working man is that he goes from place to place, he does this by using a flurry of adjectives, adverbs and gives some of the landscape human qualities.
Steinbeck also uses the characters dialects to show how American people talked and pronounced certain words like “awright, how’d, waitin, he tol’ me so”. This gives a feeling of the people in the story and gets you thinking about how they would really speak and act. Also it gives a sense of class like Lennie and George speak in that scruffy unclear dialect whereas when slim talks it’s more pronounced and the narrator introduces his speech “he said gently” to make sense of class. He uses imagery which gives you a clue of how people think a typical American would be this is also used to envelope the reader into the story.
One of the other ways of presenting America is through their dream as The American Dream is the term used for the dream that all American people share particularly during The Great Depression. It could be argued that all the characters in the novel share this proverb and he uses iterative imagery throughout the novella by using Lennie’s dream of petting the rabbits and Georges love to get land of his own. Steinbeck epitomises the American dream in a small way by saying that Lennie and George would live “off the fatta the lan”.
Steinbeck uses the...