“Jus’ tell Lennie what to do an’ he’ll do it if it don’t take no figuring. He can’t think of nothing to do himself, but he sure can take orders.”
Chapter 3 · George Milton
Context
Slim has praised Lennie's prodigious strength as a worker. George responds by characterizing the precise nature of Lennie's usefulness on the ranch.
Analysis
The grammatical structure splits Lennie into two clauses—a negative ('can't think') and a positive ('can take orders')—reducing him to a Cartesian division between absent cognition and present obedience. The verb 'take' (rather than 'follow') treats orders as objects to be received, casting Lennie as a vessel rather than an agent and thereby anticipating the legal-philosophical problem the novella poses: how to assign culpability to a being constituted, in George's own description, as pure executory function.
How to Use in Essay
Argue that Steinbeck constructs Lennie as a being whose moral status the text deliberately keeps unstable—this line, by syntactically separating thought from action, prepares the ground for the question of whether Lennie can be held responsible for what his hands do.