The Impossibility of Rabbits

One thing never changes in the novel Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck: Lennie’s obsession with rabbits. He might forget where he and George are working the next morning,or how he is supposed to act around his boss, but he always remembers the rabbits (5). Every time George tells the story of the farm they might someday own, Lennie’s favorite part is the description of how he will take care of the rabbits and feed them alfalfa (62-64) and over the course of the novel he mentions tending the rabbits more than ten times. When George wants to scare Lennie into behaving he says “‘But you ain’t going to get in no trouble, because if you do I won’t let you tend the rabbits’” because not being able to tend the rabbits is the worst consequence he can think of (17).

The reader knows that Lennie loves soft things; throughout the book he pets mice, puppies, velvet, and a woman’s hair, but the reader never really learns why he is so attracted to rabbits in particular. Sitting in the barn with Lennie, Curley’s wife, the “loose” wife of the boss’s son, asks him “‘ What makes you so nuts about rabbits?’” , but all Lennie says in response is “‘ I like to pet nice things. Once at a fair I seen some of them long-hair rabbits. An’ they was nice, you bet’” (98). So why do the rabbits keep coming up? The only real rabbits in the book are wild ones that “come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening” and sit there “as quietly as little gray sculptured stones”(1,2). These mentions of sand and stones do not seem particularly soft. This incongruity hints at the impossibility of  George and Lennie’s farm. Like the softness of a rabbit, the farm is too good to be true, it can’t exist.

At the very end of the book, when Lennie has destroyed any chance the men might have had of getting their farm, it is a rabbit who cruelly breaks the bad news to him: “from out of Lennie’s head there came a gigantic rabbit…’Tend rabbits,’it said scornfully.’You crazy bastard. You ain’t fit to lick the boots of no rabbit. You’d forget ‘em and let ‘em go hungry. That’s what you’d do’” (112). Lennie will never be able to remember his responsibilities or pet something soft without ruining it, while George will never get to own a farm. The rabbits hint at this at the first page of the novel, and say it out loud by the end.