Of Mice and Men is barely a hundred pages long. It is rarely called a novel, but more frequently a novella. Steinbeck made it short because he fully intended to convert it to a stage play to be produced in New York the same year the novel came out, which was 1937. He wrote the book in such a way that it would be easy to convert it to a script for a play. The dialogue was practically fully written, and the principal sets were already described. They would be a bunkhouse and a barn. Crooks' room would be attached to the barn, and it could be represented on a stage as one side of the barn which could be lighted when it was in use and left in the dark when the action was taking place in the barn. The campsite by the river could be represented by a bare stage with an artificial campfire lighted by a couple of colored light bulbs. It was a low-budget stage production.
Steinbeck intentionally shortened the "novella" because a stage play would only run about an hour and a half. He did not have any outdoor scenes in the book, except for the campsite scene at the beginning and end, because he could not have outdoor scenes in his stage play. Outdoor events, such as horseshoes clanging and Candy's dog being shot, could be represented by offstage sound effects. Steinbeck knew from the first that George was going to kill Lennie, because this was the best way to shorten the story to around an hour and a half on the stage. This kind of ending is often called "a shotgun ending." Steinbeck referred to his book as "a playable novel," meaning a novel that would be very easy to convert to a play because all the dialogue, all the action, and all the settings were already written. In Hollywood the book might be regarded as "an extended treatment."
Most of the exposition in the book is conveyed to the reader through dialogue between the characters. This is invariably how exposition is conveyed in stage plays and in motion pictures. This means there has to be at least two characters present in a scene. However, Lennie is alone in Chapter Six. Steinbeck had to invent some way in which there could be dialogue to tell the future theater audience what was going on in Lennie's mind while he was all alone. So he has Lennie confronted by an imaginary Aunt Clara and also by an imaginary gigantic rabbit. These do not have to appear in the novella, but in the stage version there would be a real woman representing Aunt Clara.
And then from out of Lennie's head there came a little fat old woman. She wore thick bull's eye glasses and she wore a huge gingham apron with pockets, and she was starched and clean. She stood in front of Lennie and put her hands on her hips, and she frowned disapprovingly at him.
And when she spoke, it was in Lennie's voice.
On stage the fact that Lennie's was speaking for the actress playing his Aunt Clara would show that she was an hallucination. The same would be true when the gigantic rabbit appeared on stage. There would be no need for a real rabbit. Undoubtedly it would be represented by an extremely large stuffed rabbit, and the audience would understand that it was an hallucination because it would also be speaking with Lennie's voice. John Steinbeck probably did not like using such gimmicks, but he had no other choice when transferring that scene from the book to the stage. Lennie must be shown spending time all alone. He is waiting for George as instructed to do if he got himself in trouble and had to run away and hide. If he is is waiting all alone, there has to be some indication of his thoughts and feelings, which would be turbulent under the circumstances. Steinbeck could have simply described Lennie's thoughts and feelings in straight prose in the book--but he knew they would have to be represented differently on the stage, unless he had Lennie deliver a monologue like Hamlet. So in both the book and the play Steinbeck had Lennie speak to two imaginary characters, Aunt Clara and a gigantic rabbit.
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