he wore high–heeled boots and spurs to prove he was not a laboring man.
Chapter 2 · Narrator
Context
The boss enters the bunk house for the first time. The narrator catalogues his attire, ending on the detail of his footwear.
Analysis
The infinitive of purpose 'to prove' attributes intentionality to the boss's clothing—boots become rhetoric, an argument worn on the body that his labor is supervisory not manual. Steinbeck's mock-deductive phrasing exposes the constructedness of class distinction on a ranch where, materially, the boss does the same work of survival as his men; the spurs are pure sign, since he never appears on horseback in the novel.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that authority in the novella is sustained through semiotic performance rather than productive labor—the boss's boots and Curley's vaseline glove (later in the chapter) form a series of bodily props through which men advertise statuses they cannot otherwise demonstrate.