You ain’t worth a greased jack–pin to ram you into hell. Christ knows George done ever’thing he could to jack you outa the sewer, but it don’t do no good.
Chapter 6 · Giant Rabbit
Context
The hallucinated rabbit continues to torment Lennie, insisting he is irredeemable despite George's efforts to lift him out of trouble.
Analysis
The image of being 'jacked outa the sewer' renders Lennie as something mechanical and contaminated requiring extraction, a metaphor whose industrial-sanitation register strips away any sentimental view of George's care. The blasphemous tag 'Christ knows' is doing real work: it positions George's labor as theologically witnessed but practically futile, a kind of failed grace, which prepares the reader for the chapter's final question about whether mercy can be administered through a bullet.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck consistently uses degrading material metaphors (sewer, jack-pin) to depict the migrant worker's body—this passage extends that idiom into Lennie's self-image, suggesting he has absorbed the dehumanizing language his society uses about him.