"Tend rabbits," it said scornfully. "You crazy bastard. You ain’t fit to lick the boots of no rabbit. You’d forget ’em and let ’em go hungry. That’s what you’d do. An’ then what would George think?"
Chapter 6 · Giant Rabbit
Context
Aunt Clara vanishes and is replaced by a giant talking rabbit, which ridicules Lennie's lifelong dream of tending rabbits on the future farm.
Analysis
The rabbit's appearance inverts the totem of the American dream into its accuser; the very creature Lennie has fantasized about caring for now occupies the position of judge, declaring him unworthy. The scornful idiom 'lick the boots of no rabbit' applies the vocabulary of servile abasement to an animal lower than Lennie on any human hierarchy, producing a syntactic abjection that ranks Lennie beneath what he hoped to nurture. The dream object has, in psychoanalytic terms, returned to persecute the dreamer.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck stages the American Dream as auto-punitive in the figures who pursue it—the rabbit's transformation from object of desire to instrument of self-loathing exposes the dream's psychic cost on those it excludes.