The Rabbit Farm

         Happiness is a very powerful feeling. Some people achieve it very quickly while other people have to work for it. The book “Of Mice and Men,” by John Steinbeck, is about several people's journey to get happiness, which in this book takes the form of a rabbit farm which symbolizes food, saftely, shelter, and a resting place. The book takes place during the Depression. It tells the tale of two men, Lennie and George, who are polar opposites of each other. Lennie is tall, strong, and not very bright and George is short, pretty weak, and very intelligent, yet they it doesn’t seem like they could be any closer. The book starts off with Lennie and George on their way to a new job. In the kind of society they’re living in, there are just two kinds of people: the rich and the people just on the border of being poor. There are very few people in the middle. Lennie and George are just trying to make enough money so that they can buy a piece a land and put some rabbits on it and create a rabbit farm. Yet Lennie, George, and Candy (a man they meet at their job, and who decides to join them on their search for the rabbit farm) all want to obtain farm for different reasons.

          George wants the rabbit farm because he wants to achieve a goal of helping Lennie. George has been taking care of Lennie for a while now, and they’ve been able to get along. If George is able to get this rabbit farm with Lennie and Candy, he will have finally been able to succeed in helping out Lennie. George isn’t desperate to get the rabbit farm, but the sense of being able to help out someone who wants it as much as Lennie makes it that much more desirable for George. But he also wants the rabbit farm because he is tired of living his unhappy life and wants to stop traveling and finally settle down. However, the reason of helping Lennie is far more important for George than the rest. The interesting thing is that George has stayed with Lennie through their entire journey, even though George could probably do a lot better without Lennie. In fact, George could probably achieve the rabbit farm a whole lot quicker without Lennie, but then George wouldn’t have the same sense of achievement because he wouldn’t be helping someone get it who wants it so much. Even though Lennie had been making stupid mistakes all his life, George would always help and that shows true determination. In the beginning of the book, on page 16 George talks to Lennie about the rabbit farm to comfort him, and he says: "we'll have a big vegetable patch and a rabbit hutch and chickens. and when it rains in the winter, we'll just say the hell with goin' to work, and we'll build up a fire in the stove and set around it an' listen to the rain comin' down onto the roof..."  George doesn’t necessarily need the rabbit farm, yet it is still his goal to get it because then he would be able to help someone out and all that working would finally pay off.

           Candy, unlike George, sees the rabbit farm as his escape route instead of a goal. Candy is quite old when we first meet him in the book and he says he has been working for many years. So, when he finds out that George and Lennie are going to get a rabbit farm, he wants in because this could finally be his shot of getting away from the Depression, An escape route of sorts. On page 60, Candy says to Lennie and George: “They’ll can me purty soon. Jus’ as soon as I can’t swamp out no bunkhouses they’ll put me on the county. Maybe if I give you guys my money, you’ll let me hoe in the garden an’ little chicken stuff like that.” He wants to go to the rabbit farm because he feels like he has been working on meaningless things for far too long now. He thinks it’s time to leave and settle down for good and do any kind of job where at least he is respected and doesn’t have to stress about it. If he was going to die, which could be any day now, he would much rather prefer to die with little regret, and the ease of being able to finally be free of the shackles of working so hard. Candy is looking for a way out of his sad, depressing, boring life. From what Lennie has told him about the rabbit farm, it seems that he has a way to get away and get that huge weight off his shoulders.

            Finally, unlike Candy and George, who want it but don’t need it, obtaining the rabbit farm is Lennie’s dream. It’s the thing he wants most in the world, and he never stops thinking about it and asking if they can leave wherever they are and go to the rabbit farm now. The rabbit farm is both a good thing and a bad thing for Lennie, because it helps to keep him motivated even when the going gets rough, but at the same time, he desires the rabbit farm so much that he becomes oblivious to everything around him. Even at the very end of his life, he doesn’t think about what his co-workers are going to do to him. He only thinks about going to the rabbit farm. Especially ever since Candy decided to join them, they have been closer than ever to getting the rabbit farm, because Candy has a lot of money saved up that they can use to buy the land. This has made Lennie want it even more and he became even more oblivious and did some stupid things that would lead him getting him killed. He also wants no one to stop him from getting his dream, and he gets very mad when people try to do so, like on page 58, when he says: “You jus’ let ‘em try to get the rabbits. I’ll break their God damn necks.” For Lennie, the rabbit farm is heaven for him, but he wants it so much that he never does realize that he’s stuck in Hell and may never come out.

           In “Of Mice and Men,” the rabbit farm is a different thing for many people. For Candy it is an escape route, for George it is a goal, and for Lennie it is a dream. The interesting thing about the book is that the author never tells us if any of them get to the rabbit farm. The rabbit farm may not even be a real thing, just an idea of hope in different forms, but all taking the general shape of a rabbit farm. For Candy it’s his grave, for George it’s his finish line, and for Lennie it is pure blissful heaven. Maybe that’s what makes the characters how they are. Everyone has a rabbit farm and your reason for obtaining it makes you who you are: Candy, a wanderer in search of a resting place; George, a seeker looking for success; and Lennie, a dreamer hoping to fly right into heaven — the rabbit farm.