I thought I was sleepy; apparently, I am not. I have been lying down thinking about Of Mice and Men, thanks to my granddaughter’s English assignment. Of course, there has been talk of symbolism and foreshadowing has made an impression on her. More so than on me. I’m a lot older – I can deal with foreshadowing. We discussed it when she read Steinbeck’s The Pearl; her teacher says the wife woke up first at the very beginning because she would see the pitfalls involved with finding the pearl before her husband did; I tend to think it was not a specific thing or symbol – that in an Indian family in Mexico, a poor Indian family living in a hut, the wife, especially the mother of a young child, normally awakens first.
But never mind that; now we are in the mice book. She has been talking about themes and settled on loneliness. Personally, I think writing papers about the themes in literature is a foray into a loneliness trying not to be alone with a theme that is not “the accepted one”. Oh, please, please, let me be on the teacher-approved bandwagon.
Now, as I lay there thinking of George shooting Lenny, I wondered if Steinbeck wondered what would be the case if George had put Lenny out of his misery before he killed Curly’s wife. That is, was it evident Lenny would really mess up and stepping in before the fact would save a life?
Whoa, that would have had the whole class looking at me like a pariah. See, this is why I don’t like discussions of literature and what the author meant – they want you to think inside the book, inside accepted ideas, to never see the book as a box that maybe a thought might pop out of into the outside’s underbelly. Have I got enough symbolistic phrasing in that sentence?
Well, I’m closing up now, latching the door. Maybe I’ll lie back down and foreshadow.
