4 ideas
George Milton travels with Lennie Small, a strong man with an intellectual disability, and the two share a plan to buy a few acres where Lennie can tend rabbits. On a Salinas Valley ranch, Lennie accidentally breaks the neck of Curley's wife while stroking her hair, and Curley raises a lynch mob.
George and Lennie keep the farm story alive by retelling it as a ritual, and the retelling holds them together more than any real chance of buying the land. Candy and Crooks each come to believe in the dream once they hear it, because it offers belonging to men who are otherwise isolated. When the dream becomes reachable it grows fragile, and one accident ends it for all of them.
The ranch sees every being in terms of its productive value. Candy's old dog is shot because it is useless and smells, and Candy, a one-handed swamper, understands that he will be let go the same way.
Crooks is kept out because he is Black, Curley's wife because she is a woman, Candy because he is old and disabled, and Lennie because of his mind. Each is so hungry for someone to talk to that they reach for whoever is nearby, yet their shared exclusion does not unite them. Instead they turn on each other with whatever small power they have, as when Curley's wife threatens Crooks with lynching.