Zack囧'page++O(∩_∩)O~

Hi~I'm Zack in block:B. O(∩_∩)O

This is a ture story, as my personal experience. Some of you might hear this from me in person but I still want to retell this story because it is life-changing for me.
===Last month, I went home for TOEFL test. Since my flight was cancelled, I had to take the train from Beijing toward Zunyi, a city in Guizhou province. It seemed like a relaxed journey to me because it takes only two hours from Beijing to my hometown but takes twenty hours for others. However, when I step on the train, my jaw dropped in surprise. If truth be told, I can see nothing but people. One tiny slight move could cause an offensive stamp on other folks’ body. I do felt lucky to have room for breathing though. Men “relaxed” in different ways, leaning their backs on seats, crossing their legs on the floor, resting their heads on strangers’ shoulder. Unintentionally, I glimpsed a mother with an infant. The babe in arms was crying for his mother’s milk. His mother, the young lady about only twenty years old, looked around her neighbours and gazed her child. Finally, maternal love triumphed over her residual dignity. She lifted up her waist and started milking her babe with her unceasing tears. For a while, I was unable to speak because I choked with sobs. Why cannot a mother milk her child in private whenever the babe needs her mother‘s love? If I was on my plane, I would have no idea what they are suffering. While some people are enjoying their snug flight in first-class cabin, these people from the same country are lost their last self-respects. What is wrong with this country?===



Of Animal and Men Zack Chen Block: BH , the book __Of Mice and Men__’s author, expounds the innocence and highlights the plight of Lennie through his skillful use of imagery. Especially the recurrent uses of animal imagery, such as a mouse, Candy’s old dog and Lennie’s puppy, serve as points of comparison for understanding the emotional states of the characters within the work and foreshadow events to come. At the beginning of the novel, Lennie is preventing from George for a dead mouse which is the first animal imagery throughout the story. This imagery indicates Lennie’s obsession with caressing silky things and his innocence as a mental disabled people. Moreover, it echoes the novel’s title __Of Mice and Men__. As a double-prize winner for literature (the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize), John Steinbeck also makes effective uses of literary allusion besides the imagery of animal. This book’s title, __Of Mice and Men__, is taken from Robert Burns's eighteenth-century poem, 'To a Mouse’ which describes a mouse whose house is destructed by a farmer. The connection between those two mice reveals Lennie’s plight that plans are destroyed by forces beyond their control. In addition, by digging the profound significance of Candy’s stinky old dog, it is evident to see John Steinbeck dramatize this animal imagery to serve as a foreshadowing for Lennie’s tragedy after a while. While Carlson is attempting to discharge Candy’s old dog, virtually nobody is willing to succor Candy. Candy has to suffer the death of his best friend with reluctance. To compare with George and Lennie, this is the exactly same situation when everyone in the ranch pursues Lennie except George. Helplessness, hopelessness and homelessness coerce George to kill Lennie. To reminisce what Candy has told George “I ought to of shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn’t ought to of let no stranger shoot my dog.”(61) As a foreshadowing, George shoots Lennie by himself for making Lennie die with dignity and exhilaration. The last but not the least, the puppy that Slim gives Lennie also performs a significant animal imagery in the story. Lennie’s fondness to this puppy can be demonstrated by his three visitations in a single day. Like a child who gains a new toy, Lennie even doesn’t want to depart from this puppy in bedtime which indicates Lennie’ person, also confirms Lennie’s deep mania with animals and soft things. On account of this addiction, the demise of puppy irreversibly comes. As a reappearance of the dead mouse, Lennie cries, “Why do you got to get killed? You ain’t so little as mice. I didn’t bounce you hard.”(85). It distinctly becomes a presage to the death of Curley’s wife. Besides Lennie’s puppy, the sense of impending doom for Lennie becomes particularly ominous in the opening paragraphs of the last chapter (84 “ A water snake glided smoothly up the pool…lanced down and plucked it out by the head, and the beak swallowed the little snake while its tail waved frantically”, when animals act out the savage and seemingly senseless struggle for survival just before George and Lennie meet for the last time by the Salinas River. Of Animal and Men, who is more intelligent? Unlike Hans Christian Andersen who imbues animals with personality in “The Ugly Duckling”, John Steinbeck endows Lennie with innocence as simple as an animal. In some ways, it can be treated as irony: low-level people like Lennie and George have no difference from animals and they don’t deserve intelligence and dreams. By using this animal imagery, John Steinbeck dramatizes the tragedy that befalls George and Lennie and abstract this novel’s theme: their delightful dreams are destroyed by forces beyond their anticipation and the inevitability of fate upsetting man's careful planning.