Using Steinbeck’s novella, Of Mice and Men, to find and detail two examples of the following theme: The strong take advantage of the weak.

I think your question has very much to do with the theme of social fitness. Let me know if there is something you don't understand.

His characters can be described as fit or unfit for their social roles on the basis of their physical and intellectual abilities.

Candy, for instance, is an aged and hunchbacked man who is thus relegated to a low place in the social hierarchy - he is a swamper. (In contrast, Slim, the most respected and impressive worker on the ranch, is described as "ageless.") Similarly to Candy, Crooks - named for his crooked back - works menial tasks. The relegation of these men to such unrewarding jobs may be cruel, Steinbeck suggests, but so is life. As long as they remain isolated and individualized (rather than collective, where they could find power in numbers), these "sub-par" people are treated disrespectfully.

The same rule applies just as mercilessly to other characters in the novel, animal and human alike. Candy's old dog, for instance, is judged offensive by the more fit members of the bunk house society - Slim and Carlson - and so the dog is killed. Candy can do nothing to stop this; he is weak, and in this world the strong survive. The dog himself is a symbol of the cruel fate that awaits the feeble. His crime is smelling bad, and though there are other solutions to this problem - a bath, a new place to sleep - Carlson insists upon killing him.

Lennie, clearly, is not fit to live in society as it exists in Of Mice and Men. His intellectual weakness parallels Candy's physical weakness. He lacks a basic sense of right and wrong, fails to control his dangerous physical power, and cannot look after himself. When, in the end, he is effectively euthanized by George, we see that even his friend and companion has accepted that Lennie, like Candy's dog, is better off dead. Steinbeck invites the reader to have a complex emotional response to this bitter truth. After all, Lennie is quite likable and, when around George, controllable. But this doesn't stop the inevitable, bleak truth of Steinbeck's Darwinian social world - in which the unfit attract scorn, rather than sympathy, for their impairments.