The Promised Land

Throughout John Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men, Lennie begs George to tell him the story of how the two of them will someday have their own little farm to work on. Eventually Lennie shares the story with Candy, the old handyman, and Crooks, the African-American stable buck, who both work at the same ranch as George and Lennie. Every time anyone brings up the farm, they speak of it in the most reverential of tones. When George describes it while he and Lennie are camping beside the river his “voice [becomes] deeper. He repeat[s] his words rhythmically as though he had said them many times before” (14). Likewise, describing the piece of land entrances whoever listens. When George again describes the farm while Lennie and Candy are hanging out in the bunkhouse, they both listen “eagerly” with “wide eyes”, and afterwards Candy offers to contribute his own money towards buying the farm if George and Lennie will let him live and work there too (62,65). Even cynical Crooks, who has apparently seen “'hundreds of men come by … ‘an every damn one of ‘em’s got a little piece of land in his head'” , is sucked in by the force of George, Lennie, and Candy’s dream and offers to work on the farm for his own keep (81, 84).

Why is the dream of the farm so strong? Crooks describes the land as: “'Just like heaven. Everybody wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody gets to heaven and nobody gets no land'” (81). This idea helps the reader to begin considering the farm in a religious context, but in Steinbeck’s other details the farm seems less like a symbolic heaven and more like a reference to Israel. The farm is literally a “promised land” as George promises over and over again to Lennie that eventually they will own it. Throughout the book, Lennie repeats four times that they will “'live off the fatta the lan’”  and one of his favorite parts of the story is that “'the cream is so God damn thick you got to cut it with a knife and take it out with a spoon'” (15, 63). Both of these phrases are very similar to the idea of a land “flowing with milk and honey”. Additionally, just like the Hebrew slaves, the farmhands are wanderers searching for their freedom. They stay at one job for a few weeks and then move on, still searching. George is wonderstruck when he continues the story to Candy and says “‘S’pose they was a carnival or a circus come to town, or a ball game, or any damn thing’...’We’d just go to her,”...“We wouldn’t ask nobody if we could. Jus’ say ‘we’ll go to her,’an’ we would'” (67). Although he is not a slave, George can still barely contemplate the idea of the complete freedom to make his own decisions. By surrounding the dream of the farm with references to the Hebrew slaves’ journey to Israel, Steinbeck gives the reader the context she needs to understand why owning their own land is so important to the farmhands.