Candy does not accompany the men in their hunt for Lennie after Curley's wife is found dead in the barn. the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of loves absence. But Candy, finally, is not Lennie, and George will not team up with him after Lennie is gone. the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Candy is in search of a home for himself he cannot afford, at this point, to give one to a dog. Lennie can attempt to look after a pup, because he has George to look after him. Slim promises Candy a puppy from his bitch Lulu's litter to compensate for the shooting of his sheep dog, but Candy never gets that puppy, and he never asks for it. Like Lennie, Candy needs someone to run his affairs, to make the rest of his life easier and more congenial. Yet Candy has been on the ranch for a long time, just as Crooks has. We gonna have green corn and maybe a cow." (3) Furthermore, he acts like Lennie when he comes into Crooks's room in the barn, saying only, "This is the first time I ever been in room" he seems honestly not to realize that the reason for this is that, as Crooks declares, "Guys don't come in a colored man's room" (128). Candy sounds like Lennie when he says, "We gonna have a room to ourselves. Not accidentally, it is to Lennie that Candy describes the "figuring" he has been doing, describing how, if they go about it right, they can make some money on the rabbits they propose to have on their farm (even if Lennie, for his part, can think of nothing except petting the rabbits). Furthermore, George never explains Lennie's condition to Candy as he does, say, to Slim.
for recognition and love, as old as the legend of Cain and Abel. To stress the similarity between Candy's position and Lennie's, Steinbeck has Candy, and no other character in the play, treat Lennie as his mental equal. John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Of Mice and Men (1937) and dozens of. Once he does not have his dog to look after anymore, Candy realizes the precariousness of his own position on the ranch: he is without one hand and therefore only able to "swamp out" bunkhouses, and he is fast approaching senility. (2) It is not so much the dog who is in the same position as the imbecilic Lennie it is the shooting of the dog that places Candy in the same position. The point of Carlson's shooting of the dog-who is old and blind and smells-is not to make an easy parallel with George's shooting of Lennie, as Peter Lisca and Harry T. But Candy and the dog are very important to the action. (1) In fact, some student and workshop productions of the play omit the dog entirely.
It has often been suggested that the Candy-and-his-dog subplot in Of Mice and Men (1937) is too much, that it is a typical example of Steinbeck's heavyhandedness or overfondness for parallels.