Curley’s like a lot of little guys. He hates big guys. He’s alla time picking scraps with big guys. Kind of like he’s mad at ’em because he ain’t a big guy.
Chapter 2 · Candy
Context
After Curley's hostile first encounter with Lennie, George asks Candy why Curley is so aggressive. Candy offers an explanation rooted in physical inadequacy.
Analysis
Candy's folk diagnosis frames Curley's belligerence as compensatory psychology—the small man's resentment of size—delivered with the leveling pronoun 'a lot of little guys' that converts a particular threat into a recognizable type. The phrasing 'mad at 'em because he ain't a big guy' locates the source of violence not in malice but in self-deficiency, an analysis that anticipates the novel's broader interest in how powerlessness reproduces itself as cruelty toward whomever is weaker still.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that the novel diagrams violence as a downward cascade in which each abused figure seeks someone lower to abuse—Candy's theory of Curley applies equally to Curley's wife's later treatment of Crooks, suggesting a structural rather than individual pathology.