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Of mice and men (Crook's loneliness) essay

• Created by: fatima
• Created on: 11-04-13 14:00

In John Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men, he uses Crooks to express loneliness because his character is a perfect example of how it was to be a black man. Steinbeck uses Crooks to show his readers what it was like to be lonely. Crooks is the loneliest in the novel because he has no one to talk and he is black.       Crooks was introduced to the novel as just a black stable buck. Before his character appeared, the men talked about him as if he were a horse, and they made fun of him because he walked with a limp. He had a limp because he was kicked in the spine by a horse once. When he finally showed up, it was just to receive an order, and the way he did it seemed like he was a frightened animal, terrified of his owner’s whip. He had no one to talk to, no one to keep him company and no one to treat him like he was important. In chapter 4, Lennie goes into Crooks’ room and they start talking about being lonely. Crooks says to Lennie ”’Books ain’t no good. A guy needs somebody ___ to be near him.’ He wined, ‘A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. Don’t make no difference who the guy is, long’s he’s with you’”(72). This shows you how lonely Crooks gets all by himself with nothing to do but read. Even though it seems like he is talking about any guy that is lonely, he is expressing what he feels inside. That is one of the many examples that shows how Crooks feels.            In the nineteen thirties, the Great Depression occurred. It was a time when money was scarce, lots of people lost their jobs and became poor, and sometimes homeless. Crooks did hard labor and obeyed every command given by the boss. If he lost his job, he would have no where to go. No one would hire anybody because of the money problem in that time, and …

• English Literature
• Of Mice and Men

Report Thu 9th May, 2013 @ 09:19

woow thankz amazing notes :)

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Of Mice and Men — Loneliness and Friendship in the Book ‘Of Mice and Men’ by John Steinbeck

Loneliness and Friendship in The Book 'Of Mice and Men' by John Steinbeck

• Categories: Friendship Loneliness Of Mice and Men

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Guest Essay

Saying Goodbye to My Brilliant Friend, the Poetry Critic Helen Vendler

By Roger Rosenblatt

The author, most recently, of “Cataract Blues: Running the Keyboard.”

One makes so few new friends in older age — I mean, real friends, the ones you bond with and hold dear, as if you’d known one another since childhood.

Old age often prevents, or at least tempers, such discoveries. The joy of suddenly finding someone of compatible tastes, politics, intellectual interests and sense of humor can be shadowed, if tacitly, by the inevitable prospect of loss.

I became friends with Helen Vendler — the legendary poetry critic who died last week — six years ago, after she came to a talk I gave at Harvard about my 1965-66 Fulbright year in Ireland. Our friendship was close at the outset and was fortified and deepened by many letters between us, by our writing.

Some critics gain notice by something new they discover in the literature they examine. Helen became the most important critic of the age by dealing with something old and basic — the fact that great poetry was, well, lovable. Her vast knowledge of it was not like anyone else’s, and she embraced the poets she admired with informed exuberance.

The evening we met, Helen and I huddled together for an hour, maybe two, speaking of the great Celtic scholar John Kelleher, under whom we had both studied; of Irish poetry; and of our families. Helen was born to cruelly restrictive Irish Catholic parents who would not think of her going to anything but a Catholic college. When Helen rebelled against them, she was effectively tossed out and never allowed to return home.

She told me all this at our very first meeting. And I told her the sorrows of my own life — the untimely death of my daughter, Amy, and the seven-plus years my wife, Ginny, and I spent helping to rear her three children. And I told Helen unhappy things about my own upbringing. The loneliness. I think we both sensed that we had found someone we could trust with our lives.

I never asked Helen why she had come to my talk in the first place, though I had recognized her immediately. After spending a life with English and American poetry — especially the poetry of Wallace Stevens — how could I not? The alert tilt of her head, the two parenthetical lines around the mouth that always seemed on the verge of saying something meaningful and the sad-kind-wise eyes of the most significant literary figure since Edmund Wilson.

And unlike Wilson, Helen was never compelled to show off. She knew as much about American writing as Wilson, and, I believe, loved it more.

It was that, even more than the breadth and depth of her learning, that set her apart. She was a poet who didn’t write poetry, but felt it like a poet, and thus knew the art form to the core of her being. Her method of “close reading,” studying a poem intently word by word, was her way of writing it in reverse.

Weeks before Helen’s death and what would have been her 91st birthday, we exchanged letters. I had sent her an essay I’d just written on the beauty of wonder, stemming from the wonder so many people felt upon viewing the total solar eclipse earlier this month. I often sent Helen things I wrote. Some she liked less than others, and she was never shy to say so. She liked the essay on wonder, though she said she was never a wonderer herself, but a “hopeless pragmatist,” not subject to miracles, except upon two occasions. One was the birth of her son, David, whom she mentioned in letters often. She loved David deeply, and both were happy when she moved from epic Cambridge to lyrical Laguna Niguel, Calif., to be near him, as she grew infirm.

Her second miracle, coincidentally, occurred when Seamus Heaney drove her to see a solar eclipse at Tintern Abbey. There, among the Welsh ruins, Helen had an astonishing experience, one that she described to me in a way that seemed almost to evoke Wordsworth:

I had of course read descriptions of the phenomena of a total eclipse, but no words could equal the total-body/total landscape effect; the ceasing of bird song; the inexorability of the dimming to a crescent and then to a corona; the total silence; the gradual salience of the stars; the iciness of the silhouette of the towers; the looming terror of the steely eclipse of all of nature. Now that quelled utterly any purely “scientific” interest. One became pure animal, only animal, no “thought-process” being even conceivable.

One who claims not to know wonders shows herself to be one.

She was so intent on the beauty of the poets she understood so deeply, she never could see why others found her appreciations remarkable. Once, when I sent her a note complimenting her on a wonderfully original observation she’d made in a recent article, she wrote: “So kind of you to encourage me. I always feel that everything I say would be obvious to anyone who can read, so am always amazed when someone praises something.”

Only an innocent of the highest order would say such a beautiful, preposterous thing. When recently the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her the Gold Medal for Belle Lettres and Criticism, Helen was shocked.

“You could have floored me when I got the call,” she wrote to me, adding: “Perhaps I was chosen by the committee because of my advanced age; if so, I can’t complain. The quote that came to mind was Lowell’s ‘My head grizzled with the years’ gold garbage.’”

She was always doing that — attaching a quotation from poetry to a thought or experience of her own, as if she occupied the same room as all the great poets, living with them as closely as loved ones in a tenement.

Shelley called poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” I never fully got that famous line. But if the legislators’ laws apply to feeling and conduct, I think he was onto something. If one reads poetry — ancient and modern — as deeply as Helen did, and stays with it, and lets it roll around in one’s head, the effect is transporting. You find yourself in a better realm of feeling and language. And nothing of the noisier outer world — not Donald Trump, not Taylor Swift — can get to you.

In our last exchange of letters, Helen told me about the death she was arranging for herself. I was brokenhearted to realize that I was losing someone who had given me and countless others so much thought and joy. Her last words to me were telling, though, and settled the matter as only practical, spiritual Helen could:

I feel not a whit sad at the fact of death, but massively sad at leaving friends behind, among whom you count dearly. I have always known what my true feelings are by whatever line of poetry rises unbidden to my mind on any occasion; to my genuine happiness, this time was a line from Herbert’s “Evensong,” in which God (always in Herbert, more like Jesus than Jehovah), says to the poet, “Henceforth repose; your work is done.”

She closed her letter as I closed my response. “Love and farewell.”

Roger Rosenblatt is the author, most recently, of “Cataract Blues: Running the Keyboard.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Paul Auster, author who explored New York and life’s riddles, dies at 77

Over more than 30 books, Mr. Auster often used New York as a backdrop for stories of characters struggling to make sense of life’s random chaos

Paul Auster, a celebrated American novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who used New York — and in particular his beloved Brooklyn — as a canvas for tales populated with characters groping for meaning amid the randomness of chance and life-altering events, died April 30 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 77.

His death, of complications from lung cancer, was announced by his family.

Mr. Auster began as a poet and retained his affinity for evocative language and mood as one of the emerging stars of the New York literary scene in the 1980s. Other writers looked to the bacchanal of Manhattan during a boom time of fast money and Wall Street excesses. Mr. Auster found his voice within darker corners of the city and the soul, most notably with his “The New York Trilogy,” three novels from the 1980s later combined into a single volume.

Reviewers often portrayed Mr. Auster as a transatlantic hybrid during a career that included more than 30 books as well as essays, poetry and screenplays. He was fully American in his sense of place and dialogue. To many, though, his books were also infused with French literary traditions, including existential musings and surrender to fate, from his years living in Paris as an aspiring author.

Mr. Auster acknowledged an intellectual debt to France. Yet one of the most recurring themes of his work — how a single, chance moment can change everything — came from an incident at summer camp when he was 14.

A lightning bolt killed one of the boys in his group as they scrambled to find an open field during a sudden storm. “I’ve always been haunted by what happened, the utter randomness of it,” Mr. Auster recalled . “I think it was the most important day of my life.”

More than two decades later, the vagaries of chance led him to his first novel , “City of Glass” in 1985. He was at home in Brooklyn, dabbling with story ideas and worrying about his growing debts, when the phone rang. The caller asked if he had reached the number for the storied Pinkerton detective agency. Auster said no. The same man, still looking for Pinkerton, misdialed Mr. Auster’s number the next day, too.

Mr. Auster then imagined: What if he had pretended to be a Pinkerton private eye and took a case. In the novel, a writer named Quinn poses as a detective. The story unfolds in classic noir style of hard-boiled dialogue and deepening intrigue, but the case also uncovers clues that lead to meditations on language and the lines between reality, illusion and madness.

“Kafka goes gumshoe” was how one of Mr. Auster’s editors described “City of Glass” and the following books in the trilogy, published the next year, “Ghosts” and “The Locked Room.”

The critical success of the trilogy led Mr. Auster to often being called a writer of detective fiction. He complained that such a label was too narrow, saying that he sought to convey life’s Jenga tower of memory, events and decisions. “You could also say ‘Crime and Punishment’ is a detective story, I suppose,” he wrote in a 2017 examination of his work, “A Life in Words.”

His novels that followed the trilogy delved more into the archaeology of the mind, often layered with autobiographical, literary and historical references. “Moon Palace” (1989) unspools the odyssey of a college student at Columbia (Mr. Auster’s alma mater) who inherits 1,492 books (think Columbus voyage) from an uncle and then gradually sinks into misery as he reads, and then sells off, the collection.

In 1992’s “Leviathan,” a novelist named Benjamin Sachs is blown to bits by a bomb he was assembling. Another writer, Peter Aaron, digs into Sachs’s life. (Aaron’s wife is Iris, a backward rendering of the name of Mr. Auster’s second wife, novelist Siri Hustvedt.)

The novel takes its name from a treatise on the obligations of power by the 17th-century social philosopher Thomas Hobbes and also is an allusion to Ahab’s ill-fated obsession with the white whale in “Moby Dick,” which Mr. Auster called one of the greatest works in American literature.

“Sachs,” Mr. Auster told the New York Times, “is somebody torn between his gift — which is literary — and something in him that is constantly pushing him out into the world to make a real difference in a concrete way.” But Sachs is neither a hardcore revolutionary nor a sociopath. It’s unclear what Sachs really wants.

‘Exposing the plumbing’

Mr. Auster reveled in such ambiguities. His characters are often unreliable narrators, leaving readers to grapple with what is truth and what is not. “I’ve always been interested in turning the process inside out, exposing the plumbing so to speak, not covering up the walls,” he said.

Mr. Auster’s narratives were mostly rooted in the here and now. His writing style was not. He wrote his first drafts in notebooks, often using a fountain pen, in a minimalist apartment near his brownstone in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. “You feel that the words are coming out of your body,” he once said of physical act of writing in longhand, “and then you dig the words into the page.”

He then typed the pages on his Olympia typewriter, a machine that was the star of his 2002 book , “The Story of My Typewriter,” with illustrations by Sam Messer. For decades, Mr. Auster puffed away at Davidoff cigarillos, whose gray-blue smoke became as much a part of his public image as his heavy-lidded eyes and thick dark hair.

With his literary fame on the rise, Hollywood took interest. One of his first screenplays, “Smoke” (1995), was something of a love letter to his Brooklyn neighborhood. In the film, directed by Wayne Wang, a tobacco shop owner (played by Harvey Keitel) is the anchor for a group of local strivers and strugglers, including a chain-smoking writer (William Hurt) whose name is Paul Benjamin, Mr. Auster’s first and middle names.

The tobacco proprietor takes a photo of the shop every day at 8 a.m. from the same angle. He explains that each photo is subtly different depending on the weather or the angle of the seasonal light. This daily photo mission was Mr. Auster explaining his own creative method, needing to write every day even if the words are not flowing.

“[The] excitement, the struggle, is emboldening and vivifying,” he said in a 2017 interview. “I just feel more alive writing.”

New Jersey to Brooklyn

Paul Benjamin Auster was born in Newark on Feb. 3, 1947, and was raised in suburban New Jersey towns including Maplewood. His father was part of a family-run business that owned buildings in Jersey City. His mother was a homemaker.

Mr. Auster’s first memoir , “The Invention of Solitude” (1982), looked back at the emotional gulf he felt with his father. “Instead of healing me as I thought it would,” he wrote, “the act of writing has kept this wound open. … Instead of burying my father for me, these words have kept him alive.”

Two very different publications — Mad magazine and a six-volume collection of Robert Louis Stevenson — shaped his early life, Mr. Auster said. Stevenson inspired him to craft his own adventure stories. Mad’s adolescent irreverence, he wrote in his 2013 memoir, “Report from the Interior,” showed him “you don’t have to swallow the dogma they were trying to sell you.”

He graduated from Columbia in 1969 with a degree in comparative literature — and also took part in antiwar demonstrations and sit-ins. He was nearly expelled when he abandoned an exchange program in Paris, upset over rules that demanded French language study instead of literature classes. (He stayed at Columbia for a master’s degree in 1970.)

He found a spot briefly on an oil tanker in the Gulf of Mexico before moving to Paris in 1971, working on poetry and finding translation jobs. He returned to New York in 1974 and hunted for any way to make money from writing, including once agreeing to try to write a pornographic novel under the pen name Paul Quinn. He gave up after “about 20 or 30 pages,” he wrote.

He also tried his hand at theater, writing plays that included an exploration of futility called “Laurel and Hardy Go to Heaven.” It was, he said, “a flop.”

A volume of original poetry, “Unearth,” was published in 1974. For nearly the next five decades, Mr. Auster produced a new book every several years, including “The Book of Illusions” (2002), about a biographer looking into the disappearance of a star from the silent-movie era; “Oracle Night” (2003), about a man who learns how much of his life was governed by chance; and “Winter Journal” (2012), an examination of aging.

He wrote and directed movies such as the comedy “Blue in the Face” (1995) and “The Inner Life of Martin Frost” (2007), about an author (David Thewlis) who becomes infatuated with a young woman at a friend’s country house.

Mr. Auster turned to nonfiction in recent years with “Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane” (2021) and “Bloodbath Nation” (2023) about American gun violence. His final novel , “Baumgartner,” came out last year.

The book follows the eponymous lead character — in his 70s like Mr. Auster — as he deals with failing health, loneliness and looming mortality. “Anything can happen to us at any moment,” Baumgartner says in the novel. “You know that, I know that, everyone knows that — and if they don’t, well, they haven’t been paying attention.”

In April 2022, while Mr. Auster was finishing the book, his 44-year-old son Daniel Auster died following a drug overdose after being charged in the drug-related death of his 10-month-old daughter, Ruby. According to court records, the girl consumed a lethal amount of heroin and fentanyl while Daniel Auster was sleeping after taking drugs. Mr. Auster declined to publicly speak about incident.

Mr. Auster’s first marriage, to the writer Lydia Davis, ended in divorce. He married Hustvedt in 1981. In addition to his wife, other survivors include their daughter; a sister; and a grandson.

Mr. Auster received several French literary awards. In 2017, he was shortlisted for Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for the novel “4321,” which has a thunderstorm scene eerily similar to Mr. Auster’s childhood experience. In the book, a 13-year-old boy, excited by discovering books and girls and happy with life in general, is killed by a falling tree branch after a lightning strike.

“As his inert body lay on the water-soaked ground … thunder continued to crack, and from one end of the earth to the other,” he wrote, “the gods were silent.”