TITLE:
African Americans’ Dreams and Expression of Love during the Great Depression: A Critical Reading through Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
AUTHORS:
Didier Kombieni
KEYWORDS:
African Americans, Great Depression, Love, Unattained Ream, Racial Segregation, Death
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.8 No.7,
July
7,
2020
ABSTRACT: Love
and dream sometime appear as inseparable things that keep people hoping and
fighting for living and better life; this is much true for those African Americans,
who, after they were said to be emancipated, have had to pay daily tribute for
that change of status. And when an almost uncontrollable crisis as the Great
Depression occurred, those African Americans could do nothing but dream of
miracles, and live on the reciprocal assistance and love from their fellows.
John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men came in this context, with the
description of two young African Americans’ unreachable dream and the impact of
their dependence and their excessive love for each other. This study is the
revisitation of two different and opposite black Americans’ eventful life who, in search of a much chimeric future,
have been committing crimes, which
will make impossible the achieving of their goal. Steinbeck’s novel is then plotted in the double context of
American racial segregation and the 1929 global economic crisis. The
characteristic of this study has
been many folds: first it has considered the context, that is the circumstances
or events that form the environment within which both the historical Great
depression and Steinbeck’s novel have taken place; then it has based on critical
thinking, which is a disciplined intellectual criticism that combines research
knowledge of historical context, and balanced judgement, that is, evaluating,
examining and analyzing.