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As Slim leads George away to drink, Carlson and Curley watch them go, and Carlson registers bafflement at their emotional state.

The novel's final sentence is given not to George, Slim, or even the narrator but to Carlson—the man who killed Candy's dog—and his obliviousness is the structural pivot on which Steinbeck's whole moral architecture turns. The idiom 'what the hell ya suppose is eatin' them two guys' deploys the verb 'eatin'' with unwitting precision: something is indeed consuming George and Slim, but Carlson's vocabulary cannot reach it, and the novella ends by demonstrating that the very perception of tragedy requires a sensibility his class of survivor has been required to forgo.

Support a thesis that Steinbeck closes the novella with a deliberate failure of recognition rather than catharsis—Carlson's incomprehension is not narrative oversight but argument, claiming that the migrant economy systematically produces men who cannot perceive the grief they witness.