If they was a circus or a baseball game … we would of went to her … jus’ said ‘ta hell with work,’ an’ went to her. Never ast nobody’s say so.
Chapter 5 · Candy
Context
Candy's grief shifts from rage at Curley's wife to elegiac recitation of the dream farm's specific pleasures. He repeats phrases that have appeared earlier in the novella.
Analysis
The conjunction 'If' opens the clause into pure counterfactual—a tense without referent—while the ellipses Steinbeck strews through the passage enact the gaps where the dream's substance should be. The phrase 'never ast nobody's say so' invokes a fantasy of unsupervised autonomy that is precisely the freedom denied to itinerant laborers, dramatizing how the dream's appeal lay not in its content (a small farm) but in its emancipation from permission. Candy is mourning a grammar of consent he never possessed.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that the dream farm's emotional power derives from its promise of freedom from permission rather than from material comfort—Candy's elegy reveals that what the workers most lacked was sovereignty over their own time.