"Lennie never done it in meanness," he said. "All the time he done bad things, but he never done one of ’em mean."
Chapter 5 · George Milton
Context
George defends Lennie's character to Candy in the immediate aftermath of confirming his guilt. He attempts to distinguish Lennie's actions from malice.
Analysis
George's syntactic distinction between adverbial 'mean' and adjectival 'meanness' performs a moral defense based entirely on intent rather than effect: the dead woman is the same dead woman whether killed meanly or not. The threefold repetition of 'done' (with negation only on the final clause) constructs Lennie's life as a sequence of bad acts ('bad things') against which the absence of cruelty must be repeatedly asserted. The defense is philosophically Kantian—motive determines moral status—but its inadequacy is exposed by the body lying between them.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck stages competing ethical frameworks at the body of Curley's wife—George's intentionalism versus Curley's consequentialism—and refuses to adjudicate between them, leaving the reader to confront the inadequacy of both.