Mice and Men and Great Expectations Essay

Of Mice and Men and Great Expectations, have umpteen similarities. They both show the way certain characters are treated by society. These similarities may be toughened but there are natural differences that come from the different times and places the stories are set in.-as tumesce as the way the authors approach the topic.Steinbeck begins Of Mice and Men by creating a tranquil motion-picture show where everything is seemingly at peace.Steinbeck creates with words images of paradise such as when he writes A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in most to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green. The body of water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunshine before cave ining the narrow pool. A river, which is said to run deep, is calm and slow moving. Its water is clear too, twinkling over yellow sands, it has warm water too and seems perfect-almost too good to be true. Inevitably it is.Of Mice and men is set in the 1930s d uring the Statess great depression. After the billet exchange crashed in New York, money and jobs became hard to find. There was poverty all over America and California, which affected everything. Like the Ameri sack dream, paradise can only exist with money. Therefore only the slopped can enjoy this and even and so it is spoilt by the poverty surrounding it. The American pipe dream is a paradox, just like the paradise of Salinas River. They cannot exist because they contradict themselves. Paradise is bliss but how can this exist with so much poverty and suffering in the world?The Salinas River seems briefly to have get away the paradox. There is no sign of poverty, just peace and tranquillity. Then human action enters the scene. Human manners is introduced when a path is described There is a path through the willows and among the sycamores, a path defeat hard by boys coming down from the highway. Its the point that the track has been beaten hard that rattling emphasises wh at effect humans have had on the river. Other animals leave tracks that are temporary and blend into the scene. homo have left their path permanently, like a scar it proves that not even the Salinas River can reach paradise. But it is not the only scar, In front of the low horizontal limb of a heavyweight sycamore there is an ash pile made by many fires the limb is worn beam by men who have sat on it. Two more scars.The introduction of humans into the scene sees the end of the animal life in the scene. As the humans approach all the wildlife is scared of and the state is completely deserted. For a moment the place was lifeless. The peace is broken and with it any chance of the Salinas River truly sightly paradise.The story is set in California where few people owned land. They had either lost it delinquent to the financial problems the depression caused or were just too scant(p) to afford any in the firstly place. The people needed to find work one of the most common jobs wa s to work on a farm. These people became known as migrant farmers. They would drift from one farm to the next, rarely settling for long. The deuce characters that enter the scene are migrant farmers and are looking for work. This is the first introduction of human life into the scene.Great Expectations is set in Victorian England, where just like in 1930s California, the rich thrived and the poor suffered terribly. Even more distressing perhaps was the disease that swept through towns and killed many children as head as adults. This led to an increase in orphans, who have the same feelings of being alone and poor. They have the same problems as many others and werent much better off than the criminals in jail. Criminals were treated like animals, as were the poor community as a whole. Just like during the dust bowl, if you werent rich then you were a social outcast.After introducing the character Pip, Dickens begins describing his surroundings. Dickens goes into great detail to se t the scene. He describes the area as Marsh Country which stretches for twenty miles up to the coast. Pip is in a conventual graveyard overgrown and derelict. Beyond the graveyard is a dark flat wilderness, Intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feed on it, was the marshes. It is a raw afternoon towards the evening. The setting is dark and there is a sense of sinister and finish about the place. It seems to be building upto something sinister, and does so when the criminal enters the scene. He is described as a fearful man, in all course grey with an iron on his leg. He almost represents death in this scene, an evil presence trying to seize Pip.