WELCOME!
Please take some time to post two responses to Of Mice and Men before you return to class on January 4. Each post should be at least 100 words long and should include direct references to the text you are discussing. Even if you are responding to a quote in the prompt, you should bolster your own response with other references. Those references should include internal citations to note where you are in the book (p. #). When you make a post, please read all other posts for that question so that you are participating in a conversation. Please do not repeat what other students have already said. There are many questions from which to choose, so you should be able to discuss your ideas somewhere without being redundant. Remember to make some post-it notations about symbols and archetypes, along with any other ideas you would like to discuss when we get back to class.
Feel free to respond to as many prompts as you would like. If you respond to more than two, please asterisk the responses that are NOT for evaluation. Be sure your name appears on each comment, so I can see who you are. I think you will need to log in to your Google account as you work. If you can, please post with your school Google identity. If you post as "Anonymous" without your name, you will not be able to receive credit for your work, so be sure your name appears within the comment if you do that.
Crook's comment is definitely a critique of the paradise cycle and its place in reality. Earlier on, Crooks makes this comment: "'I seen hunderds of men come by on the road an' on the ranches, with their bindles on their back and an' that same damn thing in their heads[sic]'" (74). This relates to the idea of an adventurer or wanderer going on a quest, with nothing after a loss or never having anything in the first place. The Loss-Quest Archetype's next step is to have some kind of rebirth, to regain former glory - and in this case, it is more about gaining land rights to be independent. Crook asserts that no one ever achieves the rebirth step of the paradise cycle, not even after meeting hundreds of men. And I think that thinking is wholly correct, given a few stipulations. First, that a person is responsible with their money. If a person is regularly going out a blowing all their earnings on booze or prostitutes like the farm hands in Of Mice and Men, then no wonder they never achieve their goals. Second is determination and hard work. There are very few problems that could not be solved with these things. The men on the farm have neither, shirking work whenever possible and having dreams and goals, but have no real plans to achieve their goals. If both of these points are met, than there isn't anything that should be able to stop them.
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