Well, he seen this girl in a red dress. Dumb bastard like he is, he wants to touch ever'thing he likes. Just wants to feel it. So he reaches out to feel this red dress an' the girl lets out a squawk, and that gets Lennie all mixed up, and he holds on 'cause that's the only thing he can think to do.
Chapter 3 · George Milton
Context
George has reluctantly begun to explain the Weed incident to Slim, the episode that forced him and Lennie to flee their previous job. He describes Lennie's encounter with a young woman in a red dress.
Analysis
The infantile diction Steinbeck assigns Lennie's desire—'wants to touch ever'thing he likes,' 'just wants to feel it'—frames the assault in the lexicon of toddler tactility, while the girl's voice is reduced to animal 'squawk,' a verb that strips her of speech and complaint. The dress as a metonym for the woman is significant: Lennie reaches not for her but for the fabric, yet the legal-social system reads no difference. Steinbeck thus exposes a gap between Lennie's phenomenology and the world's interpretation, and locates tragedy precisely in the untranslatability of one to the other.
How to Use in Essay
Argue that Steinbeck's narration of the Weed episode constructs a problem of legal hermeneutics—the gap between Lennie's perceptual world (in which he reaches for fabric) and the social world (which reads rape) anticipates the novella's central question of how to judge an actor who cannot share the community's interpretive frame.