The Loneliness And Isolation
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Loneliness and Isolation in OF MICE AND MEN
Isolation is shown is tons of ways. For one the towns name Soledad when translated it means Isolation. Despite living together communally as a small group with similar needs, the ranch workers do not form meaningful friendships of any lasting significance. They are timid and reluctant to initiate or recognize social contact. They move from ranch to ranch like wandering nomads in constant search for work. The opportunity to create relationships becomes lost in the drive to promote basic survival.
Curleys Wife is also very lonely. She is married, well-off and surrounded by people – yet she is depressed and lonely, lacking female friends to share her interests. She lacks any human contact and conversation as she said that not even Curley talks to her much.
Other lonely characters include Crooks, who is relegated to an inferior social status by others not of his race, and Candy, whose age and physical disability place him outside the circle of acceptance of the society he interacts within on a restricted level.
George and Lennie are the exception to this: at the beginning of the novel George talks about how they are different to other ranch-workers; as Lennie puts it “cos I got you an you got me.”
The ranch itself is a desolate and isolated area, separated by many miles from any town or city. Its isolation is dramatized by the absence of any means of transportation connecting it to the next town ten miles distant. It can be reached by infrequent visitors such as George and Lennie who come to it by means of a dusty, untended dirt road that is barren of directional signs.