By: John Steinbecks.
George and Lennie are an unlikely pair of friends who are introduced in the beginning. George is "small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features." Lennie contradicts George because he is a "huge man, shapeless of face, with large pale eyes, with wide sloping shoulders, and he walks heavily." Lennie loves to pet soft animals such as mice and other things, this gets George and Lennie in a lot of trouble throughout the story. George is the more dominant of the two because Lennie is slow in the head. George and Lennie are different from the rest of the people in the same occupation because as Lennie said to George, "because I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's why." They are also different because as George said, "We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us." They also share a common goal for their future together. They want to be able to live on there own and have a couple of acres so they can plant things and have animals. They are going to "live off the fatta the lan"." This single dream makes George and Lennie different from everyone else. .
Candy is a nice, old, handicapped man on the ranch. He has an old dog that another man on the ranch shoots in the back of the head because it was to old to walk, eat, etc. This makes Candy upset for along time in the story because he thinks that it should've been his place to shoot the old dog. Candy lost his hand four years earlier in a farm machine while working. Candy overheard George and Lennie discussing about a small piece of land they would like to buy. Candy was compensated $250 for the lost of his hand and has a total of $350 he is willing to invest into the place with George and Lennie. Candy wants to get the place soon because he knows they are going to fire him sometime in the near future. When they fire him he will not have anyone or anything at all.