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After discovering shared pleasure in soft textures, Curley's wife invites Lennie to feel her hair. She positions his hand on her head herself.

The dramatic irony operates through the imperative voice—'Here—feel right here'—which grants Lennie a permission that the entire prior narrative has framed as catastrophic. Steinbeck has spent four chapters establishing the lethal consequences of Lennie touching soft things, so the imperative reads to the informed reader as a death sentence delivered in the syntax of invitation. The deictic 'here...there' compresses spatial precision onto exactly the site (her hair, her neck) where her death will occur seconds later.

Support a thesis that Steinbeck constructs the killing as tragedy in the classical sense—knowable in advance to the audience, invisible to the agents—and this invitation marks the precise threshold where hamartia becomes inevitable.