And she continued to struggle, and her eyes were wild with terror. He shook her then, and he was angry with her. "Don’t you go yellin’," he said, and he shook her; and her body flopped like a fish. And then she was still, for Lennie had broken her neck.
Chapter 5 · Narrator
Context
Curley's wife continues to struggle and scream beneath Lennie's hands. He shakes her in anger and panic, snapping her neck.
Analysis
The simile 'flopped like a fish' performs the chapter's most disturbing categorical demotion: Curley's wife passes from human to animal in the instant of her death, joining the lineage of mice, puppies, and (implicitly) the rabbits Lennie hopes to tend. The narrator's deadpan terminal clause—'for Lennie had broken her neck'—uses the past perfect to position the killing as already-accomplished even as we read it, denying the event the duration its violence demands. The conjunction 'for' offers explanation in the register of physical mechanics, not moral consequence.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck systematically zoomorphizes victims of Lennie's touch to indict the naturalist worldview itself—if humans die 'like fish,' the moral architecture of culpability collapses into Darwinian indifference.