Of mice and men, sympathy

Sympathy featured throughout the circular novella through characters, their lives and in their status/heirachy and through death.

Curley's Wife & Crooks

The reader feels sympathey towards both crooks and Curley's Wife as they both suffer from some sort of prejudice at the ranch. While Crooks is openly referred to as '******' throughout the novel Curley's Wife is not named at all and many of the ranch hands have misconceptions of her that have been created so that she draws atention to herself. Both characters suffer from lonliness but while the stable buck pushes people away and acts in a hostile way towards others (like with Lennie), Curleys Wife feels she has to become a 'floozy' to get noticed. We also feel sympathy towards the character as she is stuck in a loveless marriage which she rushed into to escape her mother, is a female in 1930s America (where women were considered unequal) and because she to, has a broken dream of being in the pictures. The reader may feel more sympathetic towards her after she is killed because of Curley's reaction being more of anger towards lennie for taking away his possession than killing someone he should have cared about. Much like Candy's dog her death lacked sentiment such as a funeral or any mourning from the ranch hands.

The itinerant workers

The reader may feel sympathy towards the itinerant workers on the ranch because of the setting of the story being in the american depression in the southern dust-bowl where the area is very isolated. Salinas translates in Spanish roughly as isolation/lonliness but isa real place that Steinbek travelled to when researching his story. Also, the ranch hands have to constantly trvel around as work was hard to find and pay was little. Many of the workers couldn't put roots down and had bad living conditions. Steinbeck also portrays the characters as unintelligent through…