Quote Detail

George responds to Lennie's confession of having killed Curley's wife with an unexpected dismissal, then lapses into silence.

The double negative 'don't make no difference' is the chapter's most loaded line precisely because of its grammatical understatement; the colloquial idiom that elsewhere expresses casual indifference now bears the weight of George's decision to kill. The silence that follows ('he fell silent again') is structurally Steinbeck's substitute for soliloquy—where another novelist might give us George's interior reasoning, we get a void that the reader must furnish, which is the technique by which Of Mice and Men keeps its ethical center unresolved.

Support a thesis that Steinbeck's minimalist dialogue performs moral work that explicit narration could not—this line's flat refusal to engage with Lennie's confession reveals that George has already accepted the decision he has not yet executed, with the silence around it preserving its undecidability.