George and Lennie's dream of owning a farm

The argument

George and Lennie travel through California in search of a job, having had to flee their last one after a misunderstanding between Lennie and a woman led to him being accused of assaulting her. Their circumstances are established in what they carry: it is incredibly apparent that both are working-class, since their only possessions are on their backs. That is the condition the American Dream is supposed to speak to — men with nothing but their labour, told that labour is enough. Even though they don't have much, they have big dreams. Throughout the entire novel, both men express their dreams for the future. After working hard, they intend to buy a house and farmland, and what each wants from it differs in a way that shows how much the same dream can be made to carry. George's motivation seems to be a desire for self-reliance — an end to being at the disposal of other people's ranches and other people's terms. Lennie dreams of tending to animals on the farm, a place where the gentleness that keeps getting him into trouble would finally be what he is for. The dream is not a distraction from their work but the reason for it: this shared motivation is what drives them to work hard. Its hold is strongest when everything else has collapsed. Even after Lennie accidentally kills Curley's wife, the dream motivates him to escape, and it remains his primary motivation up until the moment that he dies. The farm is never bought and never could be, yet it does the whole of its work as an expectation — which is the novel's treatment of the American Dream itself.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The reading is defensible but is presented as though it settled a question the novel leaves open, and the entry is mostly plot summary rather than analysis. The farm dream is unmistakably present; what it does in the book is the disputed part. Steinbeck introduces the dream in order to destroy it, and the destruction is where the novel's weight falls — which supports reading the book as an indictment of the American Dream, or of its unavailability to itinerant labour in the Depression, rather than as a work celebrating aspiration from humble beginnings. The argument's own account demonstrates this without noticing: the dream sustains Lennie right up to the moment he is shot, and is never attained by anyone. It is also one theme among several with equal textual support. Loneliness and isolation are stated directly by Crooks, Candy and Curley's wife in turn; the disposal of those who have outlived their usefulness is structured into the parallel between Candy's dog and Lennie; and the predatory economics of migrant ranch work frames everything. A question asking what the themes are is not answered by nominating one and treating the rest as absent. One detail also matters for the argument's own reasoning: the entry says Lennie 'accidentally murders' Curley's wife. Murder requires intent, and the text is explicit that the killing was unintended — a distinction the argument's account of Lennie's motivation depends on.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] The dream drives the characters and is then destroyed, never attained by anyone — which supports reading the novel as an indictment of the American Dream's availability rather than an expression of it. [Rejecting C] Loneliness, the disposal of those no longer useful, and the economics of migrant labour have equal textual support, so identifying one theme does not answer a question about the novel's themes.