The deep green pool of the Salinas River was still in the late afternoon. Already the sun had left the valley to go climbing up the slopes of the Gabilan mountains, and the hilltops were rosy in the sun.
Chapter 6 · Narrator
Context
These are the opening sentences of the final chapter, returning the reader to the riverside clearing where the novel began, just before Lennie arrives to hide after killing Curley's wife.
Analysis
The chapter opens with a circular geography—'deep green pool,' 'Salinas River,' 'Gabilan mountains'—that lexically rhymes with Chapter 1, but the temporal markers ('late afternoon,' sun 'left the valley') invert the original morning setting. Steinbeck's pastoral diction ('rosy,' 'still') is doing structural rather than decorative work: by recycling the opening tableau at day's end, the prose enforces a diurnal-and-narrative closure before any human event has occurred, so that the killing to come will read as completion rather than rupture.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck constructs the novella's tragic inevitability through landscape symmetry rather than character psychology—this passage's deliberate echo of the opening chapter frames Lennie's death as the closing of a formal circuit.