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

What is friendship? To most, friendship is a bond between two or more people who share pure and happy feelings with one another establishing a sense of trust and affection. Many people would put friends, or friendship, at the top of their priority list next to family and something like school or work, but to others, they wouldn 't. These people are the type who have realized that there are bad friendships too. But in reality are their really bad friendships? To me there are no bad friendships, just two people who haven 't realized that they just aren 't meant to be friends. In a novella Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, we get to see a very unique friendship between two ranchers, George and Lennie. George takes in Lennie when his aunt Clara …show more content…
In the beginning of the book, we see Lennie is most pleased when feeling soft objects, specifically mice, which causes many mishaps in the end such as killing many nice, killing a puppy, and eventually killing the wife of one of the ranchers. George, aware of the fact the Lennie was potentially on the verge of death, took into considerations that he was dangerous and killing him was what needed to be done. The question here though is was George a good friend to Lennie? To many people this will bring a huge red flag to their attention, implying that George was definitely not a good friend. But they are simply judging George on one thing, that may have been major and not friend like, but needed to be done. Because besides the fact the he killed Lennie, there is no real reason to think that he wasn 't a good friend. Throughout the novella we are being shown major and minor reasons as to why George was a good friend to Lennie.In the beginning of the story, we have been shown Lennie’s obsession over mice and soft objects. The result of the Lennie always wanted to pick up and play with mice is that he always ends up killing the