But the rabbit repeated softly over and over, "He gonna leave you, ya crazy bastard. He gonna leave ya all alone. He gonna leave ya, crazy bastard."
Chapter 6 · Narrator
Context
Despite Lennie's protests, the hallucinated rabbit chants over and over that George will abandon him, driving Lennie to cry out for George who then immediately appears.
Analysis
The anaphoric triplet—'He gonna leave you,' 'He gonna leave ya,' 'He gonna leave ya'—employs incantatory repetition that approaches the rhythm of liturgy or curse, and the modulation of 'you' to 'ya' tracks how the formal accusation softens into colloquial intimacy as it bores deeper. The adverb 'softly' is crucial: the rabbit no longer shouts but whispers, performing the way intrusive thought works in the actual phenomenology of anxiety, by quiet insistence rather than volume.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck's prose mimics the formal patterns of psychological breakdown—the rabbit's incantatory anaphora demonstrates that abandonment functions in Lennie's mind not as a thought but as a rhythm, more felt than reasoned.