The Role Of Hope In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

Imagine you are a man during the 1930’s, you have no family and you need money so you work as a rancher, you are constantly moving from place to place alone, no family, no permanent home. You are lonely and poor, life as a rancher is hard and rough but you keep doing it, why? because of the hope that someday you will make enough money as a rancher to have your own house. Hope gets people through hard things as seen in Of Mice and Men.
Pale yellow which is the color of hope best conveys John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men through the many characters’ different hopes and dreams for the future.
Lennie and George hold onto the hope throughout the entire book that they will one day have land of their own. George often brings up the fact that Lennie and him are different from the other ranchers because they have something they are working towards,
Curley’s wife always hoped to be an actress and even after she was married and settled down on the ranch, she still had those hopes of being famous in the back of her head. For example, when she gets annoyed with Lennie and Crooks she begins bragging about almost being in shows when she was younger, “ ‘...Whatta I care? You bindle bums think you're so damn good. Whatta ya think I am, a kid? I tell ya I could of went with shows. Not jus' one, neither. An' a guy tol' me he could put me in pitchers…’ She was breathless with indignation. ‘—Sat'iday night. Ever'body out doin' som'pin'. Ever'body! An' what am I doin'? Standin' here talkin' to a bunch of bindle stiffs—a nigger an' a dum-dum and a lousy ol' sheep—an' likin' it because they ain't nobody else.’ " (Steinbeck 78). However, as seen above, that bragging soon turns into resentment toward her younger self for never following her dreams. Through this we can see that even though she is stuck in a lousy marriage on a random ranch and treated as less than everybody else simply because she is a woman, she still hopes to make it out and get to perform and be in