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After Curley's wife's lynching threat, Crooks falls completely silent and the narrator describes what happens to his selfhood under the pressure of her power.

The serial negation—'no personality, no ego—nothing'—escalates through three steps of progressive abstraction until selfhood is reduced to its inverse. The reflexive verb 'reduced himself' is grammatically crucial: Crooks is described as the agent of his own diminishment, because the survival strategy demands that he perform his own erasure before the threat can be carried out by others. The dash before 'nothing' marks the moment when even the act of negation runs out of categories to negate.

Argue that Steinbeck identifies a specific psychological technology of survival under racial terror—the strategic self-annihilation by which the threatened subject preempts the violence by becoming nothing it could be done to—this sentence's grammar makes the strategy visible as agency rather than mere collapse.