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- Of Mice and Men is about the loss of innocence
- Argument1 of 2›
Lennie's interactions with animals
Lennie has a fixation on small, soft animals and is known for accidentally killing them.
The argument
Lennie has trouble understanding his strength. Throughout the novel, the reader sees him accidentally kill animals, most notably, a puppy. Due to Lennie's disability, he views the world in a very child-like manner. He is not able to fully understand nor acknowledge why these animals died and that he was being too rough with them. His child-like manner of speech and behavior contrasts strongly with the violent actions that he takes. In a way, this shows that much of his characterization involves a gradual loss of innocence, ultimately coming to a head when he kills the puppy and hides it. This ultimately leads him to unintentionally killing Curley's wife.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Critics reading the novel differently argue Lennie's arc is less a loss of innocence than its persistence: he never comprehends the harm he causes and dies as guileless as he began, so innocence is destroyed by the world rather than shed by him. On this view the animal deaths dramatise vulnerability, powerlessness and the impossibility of the characters' dreams — themes of friendship, the crushed American Dream, or fate — at least as directly as a coming-of-age loss of innocence. The same episodes support several thematic readings, so they under-determine the conclusion that loss of innocence is the novel's defining theme.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P2] Lennie's failure ever to understand the deaths suggests his innocence is never lost but destroyed from outside, which fits themes of vulnerability or fate as well as loss of innocence. [Rejecting C] The same episodes support competing readings — friendship, the doomed American Dream, prejudice — so they do not single out loss of innocence as the novel's defining theme.