Lennie's interactions with animals

The argument

Lennie has trouble understanding his strength, and the novel establishes the problem through a series of small deaths rather than through one event. Throughout the novel the reader sees him accidentally kill animals, most notably a puppy. In each case the intention is affectionate: he wants to hold the animal, and the harm follows from the holding. Due to Lennie's disability, he views the world in a very child-like manner, and one consequence is that he is not able to fully understand nor acknowledge why these animals died and that he was being too rough with them. The contrast this produces is what carries the theme. His child-like manner of speech and behavior sits against the violent actions that he takes, and the gap between them is never closed by any recognition on his part. A reader watching the pattern accumulate understands what is happening before Lennie does, and understands that he will not come to understand it himself. In a way, this shows that much of his characterization involves a gradual loss of innocence, tracked through the animals rather than announced anywhere in the text. The puppy is where that process comes to a head, and the detail marking the change is not the killing but what follows it. He hides the body, which means he has grasped that something has gone wrong and must be concealed, even though he cannot say why. Concealment is the first sign of a knowledge he did not have before. The same pattern then plays out at full scale when this ultimately leads him to unintentionally killing Curley's wife, in the same manner and for the same reason as the animals. Read through those interactions, Of Mice and Men is a novel about innocence lost incrementally by someone who cannot see it going.

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.