"Well, it's ten acres," said George. "Got a little win'mill. Got a little shack on it, an' a chicken run. Got a kitchen, orchard, cherries, apples, peaches, 'cots, nuts, got a few berries. They’s a place for alfalfa and plenty water to flood it. They’s a pig pen——"
Chapter 3 · George Milton
Context
Lennie has prompted George, as he has many times before, to describe the small farm they hope one day to own. George begins listing the property's features.
Analysis
The asyndetic catalogue of fruits—'cherries, apples, peaches, 'cots, nuts...berries'—creates a paratactic abundance whose rhythm imitates the cornucopia it names; no 'and' slows the eye, so the list reads as continuous plenitude rather than enumerated finitude. The diminutive 'little' applied to windmill, shack, and chicken run domesticates the dream to manageable scale, distinguishing it from the grandiose American Dream of accumulation: this is georgic rather than capitalist, sufficiency rather than expansion. The unfinished syntax ('They's a pig pen——') leaves the catalogue open, suggesting the dream itself cannot quite be closed off into a finite list.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck distinguishes a Jeffersonian agrarian dream of sufficiency from the acquisitive American Dream of accumulation—George's farm catalogue, with its 'little' qualifiers and emphasis on subsistence (not market) yields, articulates an older, almost obsolete vision of independence.