Following the elaborate parties of the roaring twenties came a time America had never seen the likes of before. The Great Depression. The economy collapsed, poverty increased, and more people were looking for jobs than ever before. For many Americans, the only thing they had to hold on to was hope. However, author John Steinbeck believed that even that was gone as well. In fact, he believed it never existed in the first place, and that life wasn’t fair and there wasn’t anything to be done about it. In John Steinbeck’s dispiriting novel Of Mice and Men, the author displays the inhumanity of the human condition by symbolically displaying the common American man and his loneliness and troubles through characters George Milton and his mentally handicapped companion Lennie Small as they wander from town to town in 1930’s California. From the very beginning of the novel, it is evident that George finds many of his own agonies in Lennie, as is displayed when Lennie repeatedly disobeys George, giving rise to one of George’s common frustrated outbursts. While walking along the Salinas River, George notices Lennie playing with something in his pocket, and grows increasingly suspicious when Lennie tells George that there is nothing in his pocket, even after George watches him take something out and hide it in his hand. After interrogating Lennie into confessing, it is revealed that Lennie has been carrying a small dead mouse in his pocket, even though George has already scolded Lennie for performing that same action just moments ago. In a fit of rage, George reprimands Lennie stating, “You crazy fool. Don’t you think I could see your feet was wet where you went acrost the river to get it? Blubberin’ like a baby! Jesus Christ! A big guy like you” (Steinbeck 9). This occurrence, among others similar, represents the theme of living in a cruel world. George, metaphorically representing the common American man living in the 1930’s, finds every part of the unfair situation he is given to be frustratingly inhumane. George’s resent towards Lennie that so often is displayed is described by Meyer in his article “One is the Loneliest Number: Steinbeck’s Paradoxical Attraction and Repulsion to Isolation/Solitude.” Meyer writes, “Though George cares for Lennie, George often finds his companion to be more of a trial than a blessing since his mentally challenged friend impedes George from the pleasures in life he most desires: eating food, drinking whiskey, playing cards, shooting pool, and enjoying the sexual company of women. Such impositions anger George, and he is constantly contemplating how comfortable he would be if he did not have to worry about Lennie” (Meyer 298). George fully understands the consequences of living with Lennie, yet he doesn’t feel that leaving Lennie behind is an option. Lennie has cursed George with the frustratingly large burden that he has to offer, taking away any remaining chance of living happily in 1930’s American society. As the novel progresses, it becomes evident that each character has been given one thing to cling to, whether it is a person, an object, or even a mouse. However, as the novel progresses further yet, the reader begins to realize that all of these symbols of hope or happiness or love are destroyed in a brutally crushing manner. Lennie loses his mouse, his object of comfort during hard times; Candy loses his dog, his life long companion who is all he has; Curley loses his pride, his only friend in a place where everyone else rejects him; Crooks loses his rights, the last thing that could possibly be controlled for him in the white man’s America he lives in; George loses Lennie, his best friend who he cares about enough to sacrifice his own pleasures for; and finally, George and Lennie lose their dream, their sole motivation to persevere in a world with such little hope. After much arguing with Candy, Carlson finally bullies Candy into letting him shoot Candy’s old smelly dog. However,