...the dog are very important to the action. The point of Carlson's shooting of the dog--who is old and blind and smells--is not to make an easy parallel with George's shooting of Lennie, as Peter Lisca and Harry T. Moore seem to think. (2) It is not so much the dog who is in the same position as the imbecilic Lennie; it is the shooting of the dog that places Candy in the same position. Once he does not have his dog to look after anymore, Candy realizes the precariousness of his own position on the ranch: he is without one hand and therefore only able to "swamp out" bunkhouses, and he is fast approaching senility.

To stress the similarity between Candy's position and Lennie's, Steinbeck has Candy, and no other character in the play, treat Lennie as his mental equal. Furthermore, George never explains Lennie's condition to Candy as he does, say, to Slim. Not accidentally, it is to Lennie that Candy describes the "figuring" he has been doing, describing how, if they go about it right, they can make some money on the rabbits they propose to have on their farm (even if Lennie, for his part, can think of nothing except petting the rabbits). Candy sounds like Lennie when he says, "We gonna have a room to ourselves. We gonna have a dog and chickens. We gonna have green corn and maybe a cow." (3) Furthermore, he acts like Lennie when he comes into Crooks's room in the barn, saying only, "This is the first time I ever been in [Crooks's] room"; he seems honestly not to realize that the reason for this is that, as Crooks declares, "Guys don't come in a colored man's room" (128). Yet Candy has been on the ranch for a long time, just as Crooks has.

Like Lennie, Candy needs someone to run his affairs, to make the rest of his life easier and more congenial. He needs George. Slim promises Candy a puppy from his bitch Lulu's litter to compensate for the shooting of his sheep dog, but Candy never gets that puppy, and he never asks for it. Lennie can attempt to look after a pup, because he has George to look after him. Candy is in search of a home for himself; he cannot afford, at this point, to give one to a dog. But Candy, finally, is not Lennie, and George will not team up with him after Lennie is gone. Candy does not accompany the men in their hunt for Lennie after Curley's wife is found dead in the barn. He stays all alone on the ranch, deserted by everyone, as it were, even as he will be by George after Lennie has been shot. Candy's "Poor bastard" (161), spoken to Curley's dead wife (lying in the hay) once the men have left, could just as well be applied to himself as to Lennie or Curley's wife.

There is tragedy in Of Mice and Men, then, despite Stanley Kauffmann's (among others) suggestion to the contrary.' That is why Candy is in the play. The tragedy is so understated, however, that one barely notices it. This tragedy really has nothing to do with George's shooting of Lennie, per se. As the film critic Otis Ferguson once remarked, "I have never been quite sure that George shouldn't have shot [Lennie] before the story began" (Ferguson 285). Ferguson was not trying to be funny. His meaning was that Lennie...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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