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George begins his ritualized recitation about the loneliness of itinerant ranch workers, prompted by Lennie's plea to hear 'about the rabbits.'

The three short sentences mount a parallel anaphoric structure ('They got no... They don't belong...') whose grammatical simplicity registers as oratorical incantation rather than spontaneous speech—George has said this many times, and the syntax bears the smoothness of liturgy. The categorical 'guys like us' performs a sociological self-identification rare in the novella's idiom; for the only time, George speaks as a class-conscious 'us,' aligning himself with a population before pivoting to the consoling exceptionalism that 'with us it ain't like that.'

Argue that George's rabbit-story functions as secular liturgy—repeated, rhythmic, and self-consciously formal—this opening line of the recitation demonstrates how Steinbeck distinguishes ritual speech from ordinary dialogue through anaphoric parallelism that elevates personal complaint into class diagnosis.