Quote Detail

The boss is registering George and Lennie in his time book. Frustrated that George keeps answering for Lennie, he turns directly to Lennie and demands he speak for himself.

The vocative is a bare surname plus imperative—'Listen, Small!'—stripping the address of any softening particle and treating Lennie as a subordinate rather than a person being met. The interrogative 'What can you do?' reduces identity to function: the only relevant ontology on the ranch is use-value, and the boss's question presumes Lennie either is what he can do or is nothing. The boss does not ask 'Who are you?' because the answer would not be commercially actionable.

Support a thesis that the boss's interrogation models how capitalism's first question to the worker erases personhood—this exchange reduces Lennie to labor capacity, a reduction the novel's tragic structure will confirm when his unprofitable strength becomes his death sentence.