The American Dream is an illusion Essay

The two men want to join the dream desperately and Candy offers his life's savings, Crooks his free service, in order to be apart of the dream. However as soon as he offers his sharing of the dream, Crooks revokes it due to his realisation that he will never be able to reach the dream because of his race and others attitudes toward him and the dream. Crooks is shown as a bitter man however for a moment he allows himself to imagine the fantasy of tending a patch of garden on Lennie's farm one day. However the journey in Steinbeck writes George and Lennie taking, which in the end leaves Lennie dead tragically proves Crooks right that a dream like theirs has no place in a world in which they live, one with hardship, poverty and injustice which reinforces Steinbeck's message of the impossibility of reaching the dream. This awakens George and Crooks to the impossibility of this dream. However Candy was the opposite of Crooks, he was positive the dream was going to happen, "I'd make a will an' leave my share to you guys in case I kick off, 'cause I ain't got no relatives or nothing..." and even told off the other ranch hands for not believing in it. In the end though when Lennie dies Candy will no longer offer his part in the dream because of the lack of Lennie's investment. This ends the dream for all of the men however it impacts Candy a lot due to his age and the fact that all his life he worked as a ranch hand and never really prospered. His regret for his life is shown in the quote "When they can me here I wisht somebody'd shoot me".
The dream was seen from the beginning to be destined to fail. This was seen by both Crooks and George who represent the reason part of us whereas Lennie and Candy's 'false hope' represent the more animalistic parts of us. George showed that he knew the dream was going to fail by the quote "I think I knowed from the very first. I think I knowed we'd never do her", however he still pursued the dream in the glimmer of hope for a better life, as did Crooks for a while. Steinbeck was trying to get across that no matter how hard you tried, just as Lennie and George did, the American Dream was simply just a dream. George and Lennie went in a complete circle and never achieved anything, shown by how Steinbeck paralleled the beginning and ending scenes. They both started out as having dreams they were hoping to achieve and by the end the dream was still as unattainable as at the beginning It did not matter how hard they worked, or how many other people were included in the dream, they were never going to be able to reach their goal of owning their own land and would just end up how they started.