But not us! An’ why? Because … because I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s why.
Chapter 1 · Lennie Small
Context
Lennie interrupts George's recitation to recite his own favorite portion of the litany, his face delighted.
Analysis
The chiasmus 'I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you' achieves through pure syntax what the friendship's content cannot prove: a perfect reciprocity in which subject and object exchange positions across the comma. Yet the symmetry is rhetorical rather than empirical—within the novel's action, George does virtually all the looking after, and the verbal mirroring papers over an asymmetry the plot will not allow to resolve.
How to Use in Essay
Argue that Steinbeck's most quotable line about friendship is structurally an act of grammatical wish-fulfillment—this chiasmus demonstrates how rhetoric can manufacture a reciprocity the lived relationship cannot sustain, making the line's beauty inseparable from its falsehood.