"I can go right off there an’ find a cave," he said. And he continued sadly, "—an’ never have no ketchup—but I won’t care. If George don’t want me … I’ll go away. I’ll go away."
Chapter 6 · Lennie Small
Context
Lennie, hiding alone, imagines an alternative future in which he leaves George and lives independently in the mountains, voicing for the first time the possibility of separation.
Analysis
The aposiopesis around 'ketchup'—an absurdly trivial sacrifice ranked alongside losing George—reveals how Lennie's moral imagination scales: the loss of a condiment registers with the same weight as the loss of a friend, because both belong to the same fantasy economy of the farm. The doubled 'I'll go away. I'll go away' employs epizeuxis as a self-soothing repetition, the syntactic equivalent of rocking, and its very repetitiveness signals that the going-away will not happen by Lennie's choice.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck calibrates Lennie's pathos through deliberate scalar incongruity—the ketchup detail, by equating trivial and existential losses, refuses sentimental hierarchies of suffering and demands a non-condescending sympathy.