Product Of A Murderer

I was reading Ellen Foster and I got to a point where I nearly choked on the mozzarella stick I was eating. While at her mother's funeral, she noted how the preacher immediately went to talking about how Ellen's mother would be in "green valleys and the streets of silver and gold" instead of stating how Ellen's mother had killed herself and by doing so committed a sin. This shocked me, to say the very least, that this would be the first thing on a 9 year old's mind whose mother just passed away tragically. It became clear to me, if it wasn't clear already, that there was an extreme lack of empathy and just overall pity in Ellen's life. Not only does her father abuse Ellen, which would lead her to believe that sympathy is irrelevant, but her grandmother does as well. Ellen's grandmother acts as though she doesn't exist and seems to value her materialistic lifestyle more than her family. Ellen's teachers as well seem to have the same "Ellen needs to sympathy" attitude. One of her teachers brings Ellen to the library and asks about her mother, even though she already knows. Although this event occurs later in the book, Ellen knows that the teacher knows what happened, and the teacher just wants to use Ellen as a future sob story. Inferring this has been going on throughout Ellen's entire life, it explains why Ellen knows what is going on during the funeral and yet is not upset by the events taking place. She has had to grow up faster than a 9 year old should, and this shows throughout her emotions (or lack thereof) during the whole funeral ordeal.

Because I think we can all agree Wednesday Adams is a little emotionless

Repeating Apologies

I think it's safe to say that the ending of Of Mice And Men was... unexpected, to say the very least. All in all, though, I think we all saw that this novel would not have a happy ending. As soon as George explained the incident with their last job in Weed, I knew right away it would have some sort of significance in the story.

By the end of the novel, I realized it was foreshadowing. Lennie had a tendency to reach for soft things such as velvet which causes him trouble multiple times, but the incident in Weed is what shows us that Lennie's problems have cost him his job before. The setting of the book begins when George and Lennie start off at a new job, and in my mind I saw it as an omen. The last job went disastrously, and so their new job can only end equally as bad or worse. If the Of Mice And Men had a happy ending, it wouldn't be as well known as it is today. Sad endings, tragedies, and misfortunes throughout a book is what makes it a classic for many years to come. This piece of literature by John Steinbeck is no exception. So while we spend all this time analyzing the ending of the novel, we forget that the tragedy in this literature is what makes it so well known and why people over the decades have taken apart the story piece by piece.

My Understandings

Who knows what Lennie and George are. No, I don't mean what species they are, or even what their characteristics and personality traits are. I mean based on how they act towards each other, what can their relationship be defined as; what should their relationship be defined as? In today's world, their relationship would be considered unhealthy and even abusive to some extent. George treats Lennie, who seems to have some sort of mental disorder, with close to no respect and uses him just so George can get a job easier. While in the modern world that would be considered an awful thing to do, more or less socially unacceptable, back in the 1930's it was almost a common thing to do.

Mental disorders such as autism weren't well understood and so the majority of the population didn't know how to treat them and how they would behave or respond. I'm certainly not saying it was the right thing to do, but given the time period it would have been considered socially acceptable to treat mentally ill people the way George treats Lennie. George doesn't understand what exactly is wrong with Lennie, so he doesn't know how to treat him. And since Lennie probably doesn't even realize that there is anything wrong with him, he can't tell George how to treat him. It's a paradox of misunderstanding and ignorance between both of them, and it would stay that way, metal disorder vs knowledge of mental disorders, until doctors can figure out how to diagnose others.