Look acrost the river, Lennie, an’ I’ll tell you so you can almost see it.
Chapter 6 · George Milton
Context
Hearing the approaching lynch party, George redirects Lennie's gaze across the river toward an imagined view of their future farm.
Analysis
The verb 'almost' is the line's quiet hinge: George is offering not the farm but a hallucinatory approach to it, a phrase that admits the farm has always been a 'so you can almost see it' kind of thing, never quite visible. By directing Lennie's eyes away from the actual scene (the gun, the brush, the approaching men), the line operates as both narrative misdirection within the fiction and a meta-commentary on the way the American Dream functions throughout the novel—as a directed gaze away from material reality.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck dramatizes the American Dream as a deliberate redirection of attention from present conditions—this command literalizes the dream's function as a gaze 'acrost the river,' away from what is actually happening, in the very moment the dreamer is being killed.