So you now know the novel – but how do you structure your essay?

This clean & simple new guide from Accolade Press will walk you through how to plan and structure essay responses to questions on John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. By working through eight mock questions, these detailed essay plans will show you how to go about building a theme based answer – while the accompanying notes will illustrate not only how to masterfully structure your response, but also how to ensure all the exam board's Assessment Objectives are being satisfied (suitable for both Edexcel IGCSE and WJEC students).

A bonus section for WJEC students offers in-depth guidance with regards to tackling extract-based questions: specifically, how we ought to construct our responses in a way that maximises marks.

R.P. Davis has a First Class degree in English Literature from UCL, and a Masters in Literature from Cambridge University. Aside from teaching GCSE English (which he's done for nearly a decade now), he has also written a string of bestselling thriller novels.

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SAMPLE FROM THE GUIDE

ESSAY PLAN ONE

HOW DOES JOHN STEINBECK INSPIRE SYMPATHY FOR LENNIE IN OF MICE AND MEN?

Introduction 

A great way to approach your introduction is to use context as a springboard – that way, you are meeting the exam board’s AO4 criteria right off the bat.  On this occasion, I’ve decided to meditate on the economic circumstances in which the novel was written, while briefly nodding to literary context, too. I then pivot into a quick summary of the themes I intend to cover. 

‘Given the brutal economic conditions that befell America in the decade following 1929’s Wall Street Crash – a decade characterised by mass unemployment, food-shortages and pervasive homelessness – it is perhaps unsurprising that there came an outpouring of literature (such as  Robert Cantwell’s The Land of Plenty and Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men) that sympathetically explored the lives of those weathering such circumstances. Yet while Lennie’s status as lowly itinerant worker in Of Mice and Men immediately serves to invite sympathy, Steinbeck – by characterising Lennie as a kind of overwhelmed divine fool, and intimately charting George’s sympathies for his companion – strives to inspire a more complicated, heightened sympathy for Lennie.1 

Theme/Paragraph One: By prioritising George’s perception of Lennie – and exploring in-depth both George’s sympathy for and exasperation with Lennie – Steinbeck invites the reader to vicariously experience these feelings, too.2 

• Though the text is written in the third person, the reader’s perception of Lennie is mediated throughout via George.3 The first words George speaks are an assessment of Lennie’s behaviour and conduct: he ‘sharply’ reprimands Lennie for drinking the water to excess: ‘You gonna be sick like you was last night.’ George’s exasperation, then, functions as a prompt for readers. Moments later, however, George’s exasperation is complicated by a distinct strain of sympathy: as Lennie (naively believing George to be oblivious) goes to retrieve the mouse George hurled away, Lennie soliloquises his true sense of sympathy for Lennie: ‘“Poor bastard,” he said softly’.4 [AO1 for elaborating on my theme and invoking relevant quotations to buttress my argument].

• George’s sympathy for Lennie is a prompt that persists throughout the novel. Even at the point in the novel at which our sympathy for Lennie is most strained – in the wake of his killing Curley’s wife – George still sympathises with Lennie: he worries that ‘the poor barstad’d starve’ if left on his own, and insists ‘Lennie never done it in meanness’. [Further AO1 for adding complexity to the argument and, again, deploying textual evidence].

• By using Lennie’s closest friend as a means to inspire sympathy, Steinbeck arguably rebukes the philosophy of rugged individualism that pervaded American culture throughout the early twentieth century: a philosophy that tacitly eschewed sympathy for one’s fellow man, instead preaching a gospel of prioritising oneself above all others.5 That Herbert Hoover (the originator of the term rugged individualism) was defeated in the 1932 presidential election by Franklin Roosevelt – a big-government Democrat, whose politics sought to help the needy – indicates that Steinbeck, with his rebuke, was part of a wider popular movement seeking to challenge the dogma of individualism.6 [AO4 for coherently enhancing my argument with relevant historical context].  

Theme/Paragraph Two: We are given direct insight into Lennie’s mental state and processes: we can see the naivety and simplicity that makes him a sympathetic being. 

• While the reader’s perception of Lennie is mediated through George, Steinbeck on a number of occasions gives the reader a direct insight into Lennie’s mental state: and Lennie’s childlike naivety in the face of a cruel, uncaring world fosters sympathy, forcing the reader to empathise with his unique plight. [AO1 for deploying a theme that showcases my understanding of the novel].

• The reader’s most persistent window into Lennie’s mindset is his words – particularly his refrain about the ‘rabbits’ he hopes to someday tend to: he expresses his ‘wish’ to get ‘the rabbits pretty soon’ in the opening chapter; in Chapter Three, he wonders ‘how long’s it gonna be till’ he has his ‘rabbits’; and in Chapter Four he boisterously tells Crooks ‘Bout the rabbits’. In the wake of the 1862 Homestead Act, a homestead ethic developed on the American frontier, which construed the right to own a farm and be financially autonomous and safe from violence as sacrosanct.7 Lennie’s talk of the rabbits is his childlike way of expressing his yearning for precisely this right; and, given the mythic power of the homestead ethic, a contemporary audience would have been particularly sympathetic to the impossibility of his longings. [AO4 for coherently enhancing my argument with relevant historical context].  

• At the start of the final chapter, Lennie holds court with first a projection of his ‘Aunt Clara’, and next a ‘gigantic rabbit’. That his mind conjures a giant rabbit in the first place infantilises Lennie, heightening our sympathy for this naïve, childlike individual. That this gigantic rabbit, the arch symbol of Lennie’s homestead longings, proceeds to rebuke and taunt him – ‘he [George] is gonna leave ya’ – provokes further sympathy: the mythic homestead is closed off from Lennie forever. [AO1 for elaborating on my theme and invoking relevant quotations to buttress my argument; AO4 for enhancing my argument with relevant historical context].

Theme/Paragraph Three: Steinbeck also provokes sympathy for Lennie by placing him at the receiving end of physical violence. 

• Near the close of Chapter Three, Curley, in an act of unprovoked violence, explosively sets upon Lennie, and the focus is placed squarely on the profundity of Lennie’s fear: Lennie’s terror is reiterated multiple times – ‘Lennie gave a cry of terror’; ‘Lennie…bleated with terror’ – and we are told explicitly that ‘he was too frightened to defend himself’. Curiously, even when Lennie eventually defends himself (he crushes Curley’s hand with excessive force), Steinbeck continues to keep the focus on Lennie’s terror: ‘Lennie watched in terror the flopping little man’. Cumulatively, the effect is to induce sympathy for Lennie: he is the victim of violence he can barely understand, and incapable of responding to proportionately. [AO1 for elaborating on my theme and invoking relevant quotations to buttress my argument].

• It ought to be noted that in the early twentieth century there persisted what historians call the ‘code of the West’, which conceived of male-on-male violence as only permissible when deployed in self-defence and required fair play. That Curley’s attack so plainly transgresses this ‘code’ further arouses sympathy for Lennie.8 [AO4 for coherently enhancing my argument with relevant historical context].  

• Of course, there are times when Lennie in fact initiates violence: most notably, in the sequence that sees him snap Curley’s wife’s neck. Yet while this incident in some respects strains our sympathies for Lennie – and, at the very least, Curley’s wife becomes the focal point of our sympathies – Steinbeck nevertheless strives to define Lennie’s violence in opposition to Curley’s (it is borne of panic as opposed to malice) and to emphasise Lennie’s lack of agency.  [AO1 for cogently elaborating on my theme].

Theme/Paragraph Four: We are invited to feel sympathy for Lennie due to symbolic associations. He is linked to Candy’s dog through their shared means of death; he is linked also to Candy, Crooks and Curley’s wife – other pitiable, ostracised individuals. 

• In Chapter Three, Candy’s dog – who had previously been described as ‘ancient’ and with ‘mild, half-blind eyes’ – is taken outside and shot “off-stage” in an instance of shocking violence. However, the sympathy we feel for this defenceless dog does not exist in a vacuum; rather, when, in the novel’s final chapter, Lennie is killed in near-identical fashion – a bullet ‘where the spin and skull were joined’ – the reader is forced to place Lennie in the same symbolic bracket as Candy’s dog: both pitiable living creatures for whom the world is too cruel. [AO1 for elaborating on my theme and invoking relevant quotations to buttress my argument].

• If Lennie is symbolically entangled with Candy’s dog, he is entangled, too, with the human outcasts of the novel. In Chapter Four, when the lion’s share of the ranch-hands have temporarily decamped to Soledad, the “misfits” – Lennie, Candy and Crooks – assemble in Crooks’s bedroom: as Curley’s wife put it, ‘they left all the weak ones here’ (and since we know Lennie is in fact colossally strong, we can infer that she is referring to Lennie’s more intangible weaknesses). Insofar as Candy, a crippled old man, and Crooks, the lone representative of a black America in the land of punitive Jim Crow, warrant our sympathy, Lennie’s symbolic association with them here functions to arouse our sympathy for him as well.9 Indeed, though Curley’s wife sees herself as apart from these three men, she too is an ostracised, pitiable figure as the lone woman on a ranch that is in many ways a microcosm of a brutally patriarchal society – and, again, her presence deepens our sympathy for the entire foursome.10  [AO1 for elaborating on my theme and invoking relevant quotations to buttress my argument; AO4 for enhancing my argument with relevant historical context].

Conclusion

When possible, it’s great to give the examiner something new in the conclusion (as opposed to simply repeating what you have said already). On this occasion, I start by making the argument that Lennie in a sense is a bit like a reader: he is on the receiving end of stories of the American dream. Then, to ensure that nobody can accuse me of not adequately focusing on context and AO4, I invoke contemporary cultural concerns as well as a piece of literary context. 

‘Time and again throughout the novel, Lennie functions as a kind of surrogate reader, on the receiving end of a story spun by George of a ‘little house and a couple of acres’. In a sense, then, we feel sorry for Lennie insofar as he is the American everyman, a forerunner of Miller’s Willy Loman, who has been sold the illusory story of the American dream – a story that became all the more preposterous during the Great Depression.11 Steinbeck’s novel, it seems, is inviting us to sympathise not just with Lennie-the-surrogate-reader, but also with his contemporary readership en masse: the huddled masses for whom the story of the American dream proved painfully hollow.’

A 1939 image of a shantytown in Seattle, Washington —  known also (in a damning indictment of the then ex-President’s policies) as a Hooverville. In the wake of the Wall Street Crash, many wound up homeless, and Hoovervilles sprung up around the country. Copyright © Seattle Municipal Archives

1 An itinerant worker is a worker who travels from place to place for employment.

2 To vicariously experience something is to experience it indirectly through someone else.

3 A third person narrative is when you have a narrator telling the story – as in Steinbeck’s novel – and it sounds a bit like this: ‘he went there’; ‘she did this’. A first person narrative, on the other hand, is when the story is told from the point of view of one of the characters. ‘I went there’; ‘I did this’.

4 A soliloquy is when a character is alone and expresses their feelings out loud.

5 To eschew something is to reject it.

6 A dogma is a set of ideas or principles.

7 Sacrosanct means something akin to holy.

8 To transgress means to violate or ‘go beyond’.

9 Jim Crow refers to a set of laws that existed up until 1965 and which systematically encoded discrimination against black people into American institutions.

10 A microcosm is a small version of something larger. 

A patriarchy is a society run by and controlled by men.

11 Willy Loman is the main character in Arthur Miller’s 1949 play, The Death of a Salesman. This play is another exploration of the hollowness of the American Dream.

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Alternatively, you can purchase and download an electronically delivered PDF directly from us here.

QUOTES FROM OUR CUSTOMERS

If the author of the book is R. P. DAVIS then you know it is going to be an outstanding revision guide. I actually studied ‘Of Mice and Men’ for my GCSEs over a decade ago, but sadly this comprehensive guide was not available back then because it certainly would have made my life easier!

For any student who is looking to gain an advantage in their essay writing, this guide is exactly what you are looking for. Richard Davis has done a tremendous job in providing context in the introduction to each essay plan. In addition to this, the main body of the text shows how to fulfil the mark scheme criteria – this makes it abundantly clear what specific points the student needs to make in their essay.

This is a great investment for students who want to take their GCSE English seriously – I highly endorse this essay writing guide.

This is a well-written guide that clearly explains the rationale behind each exemplar essay. The guide highlights skills needed to demonstrate clearly to an examiner: knowledge, understanding and application of that knowledge. Also, the guide stretches and challenges students to think about the numerous themes and authorial intent: very important aspects in analysing any literature texts.

I received a PDF copy and have recommended same to all my IGCSE Edexcel Tutees. I have also recommended this guide to my KS3 students who are studying of Mice and Men.

If you would like to get a good grade in your English GSCE, you will definitely need this book as it teaches you how to write the essays. Can you please write these guides for all English GSCE exam books? Thank you

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