Imagery In Of Mice And Men

Rabbits represent Lennie’s dreams and the impossibility of their fulfillment. Rabbits are a simple summation of everything Lennie hopes for, revealing his very simple thinking. Even when George first tells the story of the dream farm, it’s at Lennie’s prompting to tell him about the rabbits. For George, the farm is all sorts of freedom and happiness, but for Lennie, it is simply access to soft things. Given the evidence, the audience knows these rabbits will likely be added to Lennie’s telltale trail of small and dead animals, symbolizing Lennie’s inability to see patterns in his life and to recognize that failure is imminent.

The rabbits are emblematic of a simple and idyllic life, but rabbits are a fraught symbol: we know Lennie is excited about them because they’ll be furry and lovely to pet, but we also know that Lennie tends to hurt whatever he pets. This doesn’t bode well for him and he knows it, hence the large, scary, vitriolic rabbit at the end of the story.

That rabbit announces that Lennie isn’t fit to lick the boots of a rabbit, but that the bunny comes from Lennie’s own mind suggests that he knows deep down he’ll never have his dream.

What Do The Rabbits Symbolize For Lennie

The fact that rabbits never actually appear in the book (though they figure so heavily) highlights the unfortunate reality that Lennie’s dreams can never materialize. Mice Mice represent the false hope of a safe space for Lennie.

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The title is a good hint that mice are important here, but the first mouse we encounter is a dead one. Actually, it’s a dead one that Lennie keeps in his pocket to pet. This is a huge clue: Lennie doesn’t care much about death, and he’s more concerned with comfort – remembering this makes Lennie’s death a bit more palatable.

He’ll be more comfortable if dead by his friend’s gentle hand than with a violent end from Curley or the cage of an asylum. Mice are a source of comfort for Lennie, as he links them to his nice Aunt Clara. In fact they’re all he really remembers of her. But in addition to this warm reminder, mice also make it clear that Lennie suffers from the problem of hurting what he loves. He likes to pet soft things, which leads him to kill mice, his puppy, and Curley’s wife; thus Lennie’s happiness tends to end in some form of suffering.

Like Lennie, mice suffer because they’re small: a mouse’s physical smallness leaves it vulnerable, while Lennie’s mental smallness is his undoing. Finally, coming back to the title, mice, like men, suffer from the randomness of destiny. As the Burns poem goes, both mice and men are victim to their best laid plans going awry. From the largest to the smallest creature, the most important to the least important man, destiny doesn’t discriminate in laying out cruel fates. So at the end of the day, Lennie is in his own way much like a mouse – killed because of his vulnerability, and in spite of his innocence.