"Because I got you an’—" "An’ I got you. We got each other, that’s what, that gives a hoot in hell about us," Lennie cried in triumph.
Chapter 6 · Lennie Small, George Milton
Context
George and Lennie complete their ritual exchange about being different from other lonely ranchhands because they have each other, with Lennie triumphantly delivering the response he has memorized.
Analysis
The parallelism 'I got you / I got you' formalizes their bond as a closed grammatical loop, each pronoun answering the other in perfect symmetry—a verbal structure that is itself about to be broken by a bullet. Lennie's 'triumph' is the chapter's most devastating word: he is exultant precisely at the moment his exultation is least warranted, and Steinbeck's choice to give Lennie the rhetorical victory in this exchange ensures that his last emotional state will be joy, which is both mercy and indictment.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck's killing of Lennie is engineered as a paradoxical act of love—this exchange's verbal symmetry constructs an intimacy whose completion the killing both preserves (Lennie dies happy) and destroys (the 'we' becomes 'I'), refusing readers a stable ethical verdict.