Abstract

The famous book Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck portrays the hardships of the American working class during the Great Depression. The things are the storytellers who keep the struggles for survival of the lower classes hidden. Steinbeck employed things to highlight the socioeconomic realities of the American Great Depression by bringing the readers back to earth after telling the great tale of the American dream and showing the disillusionment of the American ideal through the eyes of laborers. Things behave as actors in the narrative, affecting or determining the actions and outcomes of the characters while also expressing the American social class system, defining cultural identities, and denoting a person’s position in the universe. Thus, this paper explores the significance of things during the Great Depression, looks at the three dilemmas in Of Mice and Men from the perspective of things, and infers from things the melancholy of regular people.