conflict between george and lennie

One type of conflict in Of Mice and Men is George’s conflict with his own conscience. This is because George had a really hard decision to make at the end of the story on whether he should kill Lennie or not. It was a conflict as Lennie was like a brother to George and George cared for Lennie a lot and just wanted to look after him. But because everyone was going to kill Lennie, George was debating whether he should kill Lennie or not. He felt that killing him himself was the right thing as Lennie was his responsibility and if he didn’t, he would get tortured by the other ranch workers. This was similar to Carlson killing candy’s dog, when candy then afterwards realised he should’ve done it himself. Killing Lennie was a hard and distressing thing for George to do as it says, “The hand shook violently”, maybe showing regret or even determination to get it over and done with. George killed Lennie because he had to.

The conflict between Lennie and Curley was distinct and noticeable throughout the whole story. It started from when they first met each other. This conflict is based on jealousy. Curley is jealous of Lennie’s size. Slim says “he’s all the time picking scraps with big guys, kinda like he’s mad at ‘em coz he aint a big guy”. The word “mad” shows how irrationally Curley is and how angry he is, because he’s not a big guy and Lennie is. His jealousy of Lennie’s size represents that at that time in America, physical strength was valuable, so Curley had to prove he was strong, but lennie seemed as if he would be more powerful than he was.