As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.
Chapter 5 · Narrator
Context
Immediately following the description of the dead woman's face, the narrative voice expands into an extended meditation on the suspension of time over the body. No characters are present in the barn.
Analysis
The personification 'a moment settled and hovered and remained' grants temporality itself the verbs of avian motion, while the parallelism 'sound stopped and movement stopped' uses repetition to enact the very arrest it describes—the second clause's syntactic identity to the first refuses progression. The epistemic hedge 'As happens sometimes' is the only moment in the novella where the narrator addresses the reader in the register of shared phenomenological knowledge, briefly leaving the naturalist register for something approaching the lyric.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck deploys a distinct elegiac register reserved for moments of death—this passage's lyric expansion marks a break in the novel's otherwise unrelenting naturalist economy and asks the reader to participate in mourning Curley's wife specifically.