Hardly none of the guys ever travel together. I hardly never seen two guys travel together. You know how the hands are, they just come in and get their bunk and work a month, and then they quit and go out alone. Never seem to give a damn about nobody.
Chapter 3 · Slim
Context
Slim, having moved his face out of the lamplight, invites George into confidence by remarking on the oddity of two men travelling together. This is his elaboration of why their partnership strikes him as unusual.
Analysis
The repeated negative intensifiers ('Hardly none,' 'hardly never') and the impersonal plural 'the guys' constitute migrant solitude not as individual misfortune but as sociological norm—a generalized 'they' against which George and Lennie form a statistical anomaly. Steinbeck's diction in 'come in,' 'get,' 'work,' 'quit,' 'go out' renders ranch labor as a sequence of intransitive verbs without objects, syntactically enacting the lack of attachment the sentences describe.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Of Mice and Men diagnoses loneliness as a structural condition of itinerant capitalism rather than a personal failing—Slim's sociological framing here positions George and Lennie's friendship as a deviation that the economic system cannot sustain.