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The Importance of Dreams in Of Mice and Men

 

There is a hint of friendship between him and George: "You hadda, George. I swear you hadda." (107), but due to the conclusion of the novel, we cannot know if they actually become friends. So, while it is easy to interpret the dream of every other character, one can only infer that Slim may be lonely and isolated as well, and wish for companionship just as the others do.
             The next three dreams belong to Carlson, Curley, and his wife. In the novel, it seems as though Carlson does not have a dream and his only purpose is to fill the role as the antagonist. He says that Candy should kill his dog, mainly because he is jealous of their companionship. But, due to his behavior when he suggests killing Candy's dog, we can infer that he, just like everyone else, wishes for companionship. This is further proved by what he says to help prove his point: "I wisht somebody'd shoot me if I get old an' a cripple" (45) and we as the readers know that he will never have his dream fulfilled. Next is Curley. Curley's dream is simple: he wants to be respected and to be seen as a man. When he goes up against Lennie, we can see him and Slim butt heads a little. this probably mean that this is not an uncommon thing on the ranch and happens a lot. After the fight with Lennie, however, we see that he loses any respect that he had and he tries to earn it back when he gets a group of men together to try and kill Lennie. At the end of the novel, it is hard to tell if he will ever get his respect back, but we can infer that the answer is probably no. Lastly, Curley's wife's dream is to become her own person. She does not want to belong to Curley. She wants to be famous, be in the movies and be known as something other than Curley's wife. We know, however, that this dream will never come true. Women are not respected in this time period and Steinbeck further supports this by not even giving her an actual name. Curley's wife is not important enough to have an actual role in this novel.


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