Quote Detail

George says this to himself, with no audience, after Lennie has lumbered off into the brush to gather firewood, having clearly gone back to retrieve the dead mouse George had thrown away.

The interjection emerges in a moment of perfect privacy—when George has no one to perform irritation for—and the resumption of whistling that brackets it ('went on whistling again') makes the soft endearment a parenthesis within his solitude rather than its conclusion. The epithet 'bastard,' which earlier in the scene functioned as abusive vocative ('you crazy bastard'), is here disarmed and inverted into pity, exposing the gap between George's public register of frustration and his private register of affection.

Support a thesis that George's relationship to Lennie is constituted in soliloquy rather than dialogue—this unspoken aside, addressed to no one, reveals an affection that George's spoken language structurally cannot articulate to its object.