“I ought to of shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn’t ought to of let no stranger shoot my dog.”
Chapter 3 · Candy
Context
As voices approach outside and the dream-planning concludes, Candy turns to George with a final, quiet utterance about the dog whose death has just been audibly executed offstage.
Analysis
The modal stack 'ought to of...shouldn't ought to of' compounds regret syntactically, the doubled past-modal expressing not a single missed obligation but an entire ethical structure Candy has failed to inhabit. The word 'stranger' is the lacerating choice—Carlson is in fact a bunk-mate, but Candy's grief retroactively reclassifies anyone outside the bond of love as foreign to the act of killing. This line is the moral premise George will adopt in Chapter 6: that the killing of a loved being must be performed by the one who loves them, and the entire question of whether George's final act is mercy or murder turns on whether Candy's verdict is right.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Candy's retrospective regret installs the novel's most consequential ethical principle—that intimacy confers the obligation to kill—and George's killing of Lennie in Chapter 6 should be read as an explicit application of Candy's lesson, making the final scene less a tragedy of choice than a tragedy of moral pedagogy successfully transmitted.