And these shelves were loaded with little articles, soap and talcum powder, razors and those Western magazines ranch men love to read and scoff at and secretly believe.
Chapter 2 · Narrator
Context
Continuing the bunk house description, the narrator catalogues the meager personal effects the workers store on apple-box shelves above their bunks. No character has yet spoken.
Analysis
The triadic verb sequence 'love to read and scoff at and secretly believe' compresses a whole psychology of working-class self-consciousness into a single rhythm: the men perform contempt for the very fantasies that sustain them. The narrator's access to what is done 'secretly' grants an omniscience the men themselves cannot afford, since admitting belief in pulp Westerns about self-made cowboys would be admitting belief in a mobility their lives disprove.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that the novella anatomizes how American mythologies of self-reliance circulate among those they most thoroughly fail—this aside about the Western magazines previews the structural irony that George and Lennie's dream-farm is itself a generic fiction the men half-disbelieve.