Crooks' life on the farm

The argument

As the only African-American man on the ranch, Crooks is subject to treatment that all the other men working with him aren't, and the novel marks that difference in the two most basic terms available: how he is spoken to, and where he is allowed to sleep. He is often called a "n****r" by Curley and the rest of his peers, so the abuse is not the property of one cruel individual but the ordinary register of the whole ranch. He stays in a room separate from the rest of the ranch workers (who are all white), which turns the same attitude into a physical arrangement of the space itself. The theme becomes explicit during an encounter with Lennie, in which Lennie states that he doesn't understand why Crooks is treated differently — a question nobody else on the ranch thinks to ask. It forces Crooks to explain why he remains separate from the majority of those on the farm and why he's grown to like it that way. That last detail is the most damaging one: the exclusion has lasted long enough that he has adapted to it, and now defends the arrangement that harms him. While he is only in the novel for a short amount of time, Crooks' powerful testimony about the racism on the ranch aids the reader in understanding that even among working-class people, there are still strong prejudices held against those who are different. The men on the ranch are themselves poor and largely powerless, yet they maintain a hierarchy beneath them. This interaction also helps connect the mistreatment he faces with the mistreatment that Lennie faces, showing prejudice operating along more than one line at once.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Crooks certainly dramatises prejudice, but two points temper the inference. First, the novel's prejudice is not primarily racial: Crooks's racial isolation sits alongside Candy's marginalisation as an old, disabled worker, the contempt directed at Lennie for his disability, and the dismissive treatment of Curley's wife as a woman — so if prejudice is a theme, it is a broad theme of exclusion of the 'different', of which race is one instance rather than the whole. Second, and more fundamentally, prejudice is one thread among several the book weaves, and the sibling positions name equally strong candidates: the impossibility of the American Dream, the loneliness of itinerant ranch life, and the central friendship of George and Lennie. A single character's powerful but brief subplot supports prejudice as a theme; it does not establish it as the organising theme over these rivals, which recur across the whole narrative rather than in one scene.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] The prejudice in the novel extends well beyond race — to age, disability and gender — so Crooks illustrates a broad theme of exclusion rather than establishing race-prejudice as the book's subject. [Rejecting C] Crooks's brief subplot shows prejudice is a theme, not that it is the central theme over the equally-supported American Dream, loneliness and friendship.