“Carl’s right, Candy. That dog ain’t no good to himself. I wisht somebody’d shoot me if I got old an’ a cripple.”
Chapter 3 · Slim
Context
Candy has looked to Slim as the final arbiter, hoping he will rule against the killing. Slim instead sides with Carlson, framing the dog's death as the kind of mercy he would want for himself.
Analysis
The conditional 'I wisht somebody'd shoot me if I got old an' a cripple' performs a rhetorical sleight: by displacing the imagined victim onto himself, Slim makes the killing seem ethically clean—a Kantian universalization that, however, applies only to a self Slim does not yet inhabit. The verbal subjunctive 'wisht' marks the wish as counterfactual and abstract, while the killing it sanctions is concrete and imminent. This is the same logic George will eventually invoke (silently) at the pool, which makes this line a structural template the novella later activates.
How to Use in Essay
Argue that Steinbeck establishes a 'mercy-killing' logic in Chapter 3 specifically to test it in Chapter 6—Slim's hypothetical self-execution licenses a moral framework that, when applied to Lennie at the novel's end, the reader must judge as either compassionate or self-serving.