"To what extent do the characters in of mice and men experience loneliness"

Written in the time of The Great Depression, Steinbeck's novella portrays the theme of loneliness, which is experienced by all characters to some extent. Alongside economic hardship, the loneliness of some characters is fuelled by gender and race inequalities. Crooks, the negro stable buck, succumbs to loneliness and sees Lennie (a character with no racial preference) as his remedy. Defeated by Lennie's 'disarming smile', Crooks instructs Lennie to 'come on in and set a while'. Due to his race, Crooks lives in enforced solitude, away from the white workers who consider him inferior. Although Crooks is often shown as nonchalent about this injustice, the fact that he seems deloighted at spending time with Lennie reinforces the sentiment that Crooks is a victim of loneliness.

As one would expect from a work written in 1930s America, Of Mice and Men depicts gender inequalities in society. Although it is easy to see Curley's wife as a cruel, seductive woman, we should turn away from this view, adopting instead the idea that she, like Crooks, is a victim to a cruel world. Curley's wife, who is nothing but an apostrophe to her husband, experiences loneliness from lack of identity, and resorts to flirting with other men on the ranch to ease her pain, but this only pushes them further away from her. By abandoning her dreams of becoming a movie star to marry Curly, she encapsulates the difficulties associated with being a female in that time; marrying, to end up with nobody to talk to her but her 'good-for-nothing husband'.