Quote Detail

Lennie, gazing across the river as George has directed him, enthusiastically delivers his favorite line from their dream-recital.

The phrase—biblical in cadence (echoing Genesis 45:18, 'eat the fat of the land')—has been Lennie's verbal touchstone throughout the novel, and its appearance here as his next-to-last utterance grants him a final access to a register higher than his daily speech. The contracted vernacular 'fatta the lan'' simultaneously diminishes the biblical inheritance and proves Lennie's claim on it; he can pronounce his portion only in the dialect his class permits him.

Support a thesis that Steinbeck threads scriptural language through working-class vernacular to register the migrant workers' simultaneous inheritance of and exclusion from American mythological promise—this phrase's biblical resonance makes Lennie a dispossessed Joseph at the moment of his death.