Quote Detail

Once George has sat down beside him at the pool, Lennie confesses—as if reporting one in a long series of minor infractions—that he has done another bad thing.

The grammatical flatness of the construction—'I done another bad thing,' with 'bad thing' as an undifferentiated category that has previously included a dead mouse and a torn dress—reveals the moral algebra by which Lennie processes the killing of Curley's wife as belonging to the same series as his earlier transgressions. The adjective 'another' performs the labor of euphemism: it both confesses and assimilates, refusing to mark the unique enormity of homicide.

Support a thesis that Steinbeck withholds tragic register from Lennie's self-perception in order to displace it onto the reader—this line's deflating ordinariness forces us to feel the gravity Lennie cannot, making us co-witnesses to a crime its perpetrator cannot conceive.