George raised the gun and his hand shook, and he dropped his hand to the ground again.
Chapter 6 · Narrator
Context
With the gun raised behind Lennie's head, George falters and lowers his hand before continuing the farm description.
Analysis
The two coordinated verbs—'raised' and 'dropped'—give the sentence a perfect physical symmetry that enacts the moral hesitation, while 'shook' interrupts the smooth syntactic motion with a small somatic stutter. Steinbeck withholds interiority entirely; the trembling hand is asked to do all the work that a paragraph of George's thoughts would do in another novelist, which is why the moment registers as more devastating than any soliloquy.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck's behaviorist narration is the formal correlate of his determinist worldview—this passage's refusal to enter George's mind, depicting hesitation only through hand motion, suggests that even ethical agonies in this world manifest as physical rather than mental events.