Who are the hero and villain in John Steinbeck's novel Of Mice and Men?

As is always
true of great literature, there are various approaches to its interpretation because a literary
work is itself a living thing, emitted from not just the mind of its author, but his heart as
well. So if one turns the looking glass another direction and examines Steinbeck's work from the
heart of this writer sensitive to the socio-economic and existential dynamics of men, the
is the disenfranchised worker, the lonely and alienated man caught
in the machinations of a failed capitalistic society. Steinbeck himself said thatwas not meant
to characterize mental diminishment, but "the inarticulate and powerful yearning of all
men." Thus, each of the characters are alienated in different respects because of the
failed, imbalanced social circumstances. As lonely and alienated men, each knows fear:fears that
Lennie will create conflict; Lennie worries that George will become angry or leave him; Candy
fears becoming no longer useful and being discarded like his old dog; Curley is insecure about
his size and his wife and fears defeat and humiliation; Crooks is marginalized by the racial
code and lives in fear of his aloneness and of gratuitous cruelty being inflicted upon him;
Carlson, the brute, is cruel in reaction to his alienation, lashing out as a displacement of his
hostility about life. 

With as a social commentary by a
writer who viewed the fraternity of men and its collective power as the solution against the
ills of a failed system of government such as that in the Great Depression, theis
the existential aloneness of man which makes him vulnerable, an alienation
generated from the selfishness of powerful men. Only through the fraternity of men, Steinbeck
felt, could men strengthen themselves enough against this adversary. This is the dream of George
and Lennie--the community of men who work together and help one another--and it is strengthened
as more men join it; it is destroyed when the "keeper" of the dream is killed as the
fraternity is destroyed and the men are again alone.

George said softly, "---I think I knowed from the very first. I think I knowed
we'd never do her. He usta like to hear about it so much I got to thinking maybe we
would."