Never did seem right to me. S’pose Curley jumps a big guy an’ licks him. Ever’body says what a game guy Curley is. And s’pose he does the same thing and gets licked. Then ever’body says the big guy oughtta pick somebody his own size, and maybe they gang up on the big guy. Never did seem right to me. Seems like Curley ain’t givin’ nobody a chance.
Chapter 2 · Candy
Context
Candy continues his explanation of Curley, sketching the no-win logic by which Curley's social position as the boss's son guarantees his impunity in any fight.
Analysis
The hypothetical structure ('S'pose Curley jumps... and s'pose he does the same thing') builds a syllogism of injustice in which both possible outcomes vindicate Curley, producing the trapped logic Candy identifies in his refrain 'Never did seem right to me.' That repeated formula is the only critique Candy permits himself—the powerless man's grammar of moral judgment, which registers wrongness without proposing redress. The conditional mood itself becomes ideological, mapping a social space in which fairness is conceivable only as hypothesis.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck uses dialect speakers to articulate sophisticated structural analyses that the language of the educated would render anodyne—Candy's hypothetical scenarios diagnose how class privilege rigs every encounter, a critique his vernacular makes more rather than less precise.