This in turn makes his relationship with Lennie important as this is a destiny he tries to avoid however, the value of the friendship is tested throughout the book as Lennie keeps getting himself and George into trouble. They get wantin’ to fight all the time.” (OMM, 41). John Milton’s Paradise Lost is a poem about Adam and Eve in the Bible and the ‘fall of man’, which is where they elect to go against God’s scheme and eat from the …show more content… George notices how this loneliness affects the other workers and tells Slim that “(…) seen the guys that go around on the ranches alone. The name of John Steinbeck’s Paradise Lost was presumably borrowed from John Milton’s epic poem with the same name, which could be a connection. ix), the novella is the middle of three, where the two others are: The Battle Hymn of the Republic and Paradise Lost.
This could be random however, as Susan Shillinglaw wrote in the introduction in Of Mice and Men (p. Meanwhile, his last name, Milton, may be a reference to the English writer John Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost. He did not choose that life, it chose him. Therefore, for Steinbeck to give George his name could be a subtle hint that his fate is that of a farmer. In other words, you can try to make things happen, but it will not work out the way you thought it would, because that is your destiny. As mentioned above in Robert Burn’s poem ‘To a Mouse’ a little mouse builds a house, but a farmer ruins it, then the poem proceeds by telling the mouse “The best laid plans of mice and men / Go often askew”. However, it may also have a link with the theme of fate in the novella. Therefore, why does George not get …show more content… On the simple level, according to, the name George derived from the Greek word, ‘Geōrgios’, meaning “farmer”, which is exactly what he is and what he does for a living. In his poem, ‘To a Mouse’, which is also the source of the novella’s title, Robert Burns wrote, “The best laid schemes of mice and men / Go often askew,” which can be compared to George’s goals of achieving the elusive American Dream together with Lennie, but as the poem also suggests this will go askew, and this is Lennie’s fault. Two migrant workers, George Milton and Lennie Small, have a work contract at a local ranch so that they one day might purchase property of their own however, due to Lennie’s childlike mental state the goal seems far-fetched. It is set in the Salinas Valley in California during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Show More Of Mice and Men is a novella by John Steinbeck, published in 1937.