Guys like us got no fambly. They make a little stake an’ then they blow it in. They ain’t got nobody in the worl’ that gives a hoot in hell about ’em—
Chapter 6 · George Milton
Context
At Lennie's request, George begins reciting their familiar refrain about how itinerant ranch workers have no family or connection in the world.
Analysis
This motif, established in Chapter 1 and repeated by Crooks and Candy throughout the novel, here reaches its terminal performance; its return at the moment of George's most extreme act of attachment produces an unbearable contradiction between the speech's content (men like us have no one) and its dramatic situation (a man is about to die in his friend's lap). The vernacular contraction 'fambly' is one Steinbeck has preserved with anthropological care, marking the speakers as a class who cannot quite pronounce the word for what they lack.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck's motivic refrain about itinerant loneliness functions as a class-elegy rather than a personal complaint—this final iteration, spoken over a man about to be killed, transforms the motif into an indictment of an economic order that makes lasting bonds structurally impossible.