Was George Justified In Of Mice And Men

Was George really left with no other options? In the book Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck there are two men on the run. Lennie, who is mentally handicap, keeps getting into trouble. George, the other man on the run, is the one who takes care of Lennie and tries to keep him out of trouble.Although George tries to make sure Lennie doesn’t get into trouble he just cannot prevent the inevitable. George was justified in shooting Lennie because he felt responsible for him, he doesn’t want him to suffer, and because he can’t learn from his mistakes. The first reason why George feels like he needs to shoot Lennie is because he feels responsible for Lennie and feels like he’s the one who needs to shoot him. In the book Of Mice and Men by
After the men find Curley's wife Curley says, “... I’ll shoot ‘im in the guts…”(Steinbeck 96). Later after they get the guns Curley tells the other men, “... Shoot for his guts. That’ll double ‘im over” (Steinbeck 97). Curley says this because he wants Lennie to suffer and have a painful death since Lennie broke his hand and killed his wife. After Curley says these two lines George knows what he has to do because he doesn’t want Lennie to have a painful death. So George made sure Lennie didn’t suffer or have any pain at the end by shooting him in the head. Showing that George didn’t want Lennie to suffer or be in any
It is clear from the beginning that Lennie cannot tell what's right and wrong. It starts out with Lennie killing small animals such as his pet mice. He then progresses to getting into trouble in Weed because he wanted to feel her soft dress giving them no other choice but to run.When they finally find a new place to stay Lennie gets into more trouble when he kills his puppy and then killing Curley’s wife. At this point he knew that George would be mad but he doesn’t know exactly why so he grabs the puppy's corpse and goes to hide. In Lennie's mind it's better to have one dead thing rather than two. To him taking the puppy and hiding it will mean he will be in less trouble. This is obviously not the case he had killed a woman and didn’t realize how bad of a thing he had done. Some people might say that George did not have to kill Lennie he could have just locked him up or ran. However George had warned him not to do this stuff but Lennie just couldn’t learn from his past mistakes causing him to take someone's