Friendship In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

Friendship… the word can be used to describe true loyalty, love, or can be used to surpass your greatest enemy. In the novella Of Mice and Men it can be debated if one of the characters, George is a good or bad friend to Lennie throughout their working experience to get to their dream land that they would do anything for. Although both sides have good arguments I argue the side that explains how George has been a good friend to Lennie. On the surface there is sufficient evidence to accuse George of being a horrible friend, but if you look deeper and into detail you can realize the effort that George puts in to protect Lennie and keep him out of harm. I am going to present evidence upon my following thesis and try to help you understand my
You would think that if you heard that George got Lennie to jump in a river off a bridge when he couldn’t swim is mean, but he literally did not tell Lennie to just go jump off a bridge. It was a joke and George even said that he would never play another joke on Lennie again because of that incident (Steinbeck 40). In the beginning of the story people argue that Lennie is a bad friend because he threw Lennie’s dead mice away, but it’s because during that time range there were a lot of diseases infecting a lot of people. Especially mice, I mean they're the reason for the black plague which has had almost 200 million people killed as of today and Hantavirus which has killed about 36% of people infected by it (cdc.gov). George was looking out for Lennie’s health which can be perceived by Lennie as a very mean action, but he doesn't realize what George was actually doing for him (Steinbeck 6). The hardest accusation is that George shot Lennie at the end of the story, but did he do it out of hatred or sympathy? George knew if he was caught by Curley that he would probably do a lot worse than himself and George knew that they couldn’t keep running. Even though George shot him. he made it a peaceful death, Lennie never knew what hit him and George even told Lennie his favorite story on his last moments. That is an
Throughout the story you can obviously tell Lennie has a mental disorder or disease like autism and back in this time frame George couldn’t of known how to deal with a person with this disease. People did not know these diseases and symptoms because people who had these disorders were sent to insane asylums and they were sent to these places because doctors believed these people could not function mentally or physically in the real world. George didn’t know that Lennie had one of these diseases, he knew something was wrong with him, but he did not know how to handle Lennie’s actions but that never stopped George for being there for him. George even said that they were special because they had each other and most workers are alone throughout their life, but they have each other to look out for. George was always the one to defend Lennie and get him out of incidents that Lennie wouldn’t of even known he got himself into. George took a lot of falls for Lennie like being fired from jobs and having to run from town to town because of Lennie’s actions so you can never say that George was not loyal to Lennie because he said he would always take care of him in the first place. George could of left Lennie at any time throughout the story, he even vocalized that he would be better off alone, but he will always keep Lennie at his side because he made a promise to