Everyone has felt like an outsider at some point in their life. Because they are different in one way or another. This is why John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is an easy story to sympathize with. It tells the story of two men, George Milton and Lennie Small. Having found work on a ranch, they form friendships with other men, try to stay out of trouble until they receive their pay at the end of the month, and strive to realize their dream of owning and to exploit their own land. Several characters including Candy, Lennie, Crooks and Curley's wife are excluded from this story. Which also makes them the most relevant. Steinbeck, through the story of Crooks and Curley's wife, explains the relationship between the causes of loneliness, how it affects the characters who suffer from it and how they strive to be accepted by or with others characters. To begin with, Crooks is a character who thinks very low of himself because he knows that his skin color separates him from everyone else and makes him worth less than anyone else on the ranch. He shows it after Curley's wife scolds him for telling her to leave her room and threatens to tell the boss not to let her in the barn again. He becomes helpless against her when the text shows him “becoming smaller and smaller as he pressed himself against the wall” (Steinbeck 80). He shrinks to nothing when he is reminded that he is a “nigger.” He thinks it doesn't matter what he says because "It's just a nigger talking, and a broken nigger." So it doesn't mean anything, you know? (Steinbeck 71). He knows that no one wants him, so he keeps his distance and demands that people keep theirs. He is reluctant to let others into his room and only does so when he is in the middle of a paper... we can conclude that even though the two characters had very different methods of dealing with it, the one being to push everyone. and the other to impose their companionship on others, Crooks and Curley's wife had the same goal: to feel that somewhere, somehow, they belong. There is a lot to learn from this story and its characters because, once again, they all experience the emotions that everyone has or will face. This story should teach us to be more empathetic, more attentive to the feelings of others and above all to accept that everyone is incredibly similar in some ways and incredibly different in others, but that none of their flaws, faults or quirks should make such a big difference in our own lives. approach to this individual. Works Cited Steinbeck, John. Of mice and men. New York: Penguin, 1993. Print.Letter. Steinbeck, John to Luce, Claire. Los Chatos. 1938.