And at his heels there walked a dragfooted sheep dog, gray of muzzle, and with pale, blind old eyes.
Chapter 2 · Narrator
Context
Candy reenters the bunk house after George has scolded him for eavesdropping, accompanied by his aging sheep dog. This is the dog's first appearance.
Analysis
The accumulation of degradation markers—'dragfooted', 'gray of muzzle', 'pale, blind old eyes'—uses asyndeton to pile attributes without hierarchy, so that the dog's body becomes an inventory of failure rather than a coherent creature. The archaic syntactic inversion 'gray of muzzle' lends a faintly elegiac register to what is otherwise a brutally clinical description, as if the prose itself were mourning an animal not yet dead. The structural rhyme between dog and owner is established immediately: Candy is missing a hand, the dog its faculties, both subsisting on borrowed time within the ranch economy.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck constructs Candy and his dog as a single composite figure for the obsolescent worker—this introductory description encodes the parallel that Carlson's later proposal to shoot the dog will make explicit, and that Candy's grief will reveal as anticipation of his own fate.